The Speaking Land: Myth and Story in Aboriginal Australia

by Ronald M. Berndt, Catherine H. Berndt

The 195 stories collected in this first anthology of Aboriginal myth were told to anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt, who spent nearly fifty years working among the Aboriginal peoples of Australia.

The Berndts developed a system of field research that allowed them entrance into a culture that has been alive for more than 100,000 Ronald Berndt met with male storytellers, while Catherine met with the women. The myths they collected come from the oldest collective memory of humankind, describing characters and events of the "Dreamtime"--a time that existed before the material world was formed.

The Speaking Land touches on all aspects of creation, natural forces, social rules, and the exotic. Stark, tinged with fantasy, sometimes bizarre, the myths chronicle the actions of the Ancestors, portraying not only beauty and wonder but also scenes of treachery and theft, jealousy and lust, greed and antagonism, injury and death. The lessons of life implicit in these stories are still reflected in the simplicity and deep spirituality of this culture.

In all of the myths collected here the land is as important as the living characters who travel it. In the Dreamtime creation, mythic, shape-changing characters moved across the countryside, leaving part of their eternal spiritual qualities in the land. Eventually, these characters and forces retreated into the living environment, where they remain today, spiritually anchored. The land still speaks to us, and The Speaking Land will help us understand its language.

Genres: Mythology

480 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 1989

Reviews

[Einzige · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5

This is a very special book, the stories in this book were collected over decades in the original languages of the story tellers by a husband and wife team -which enabled better access to stories told by men and women. What is more they also focused on collecting the stories from groups who had the least contact with European society and for whom these stories still played a very active role in daily life.

So really this book gives you an insight that can only really be matched by vastly denser and obscure purely academic pieces and insight that is no longer that available to modern researchers.
This collection of 195 stories categorised by theme and accompanied by explanatory notes does a great job of showing the real variety of Aboriginal Mythology and just how much popular conceptions have bowdlerised it into a handful of colourful children's stories.

In the stories there is a great deal of brutality and people turning into rocks and animals occasionally mixed with in with giants and man eating changelings. All taking place on a world that has always existed but then made fit for human beings by numerous spiritual beings.

A important caveat though is that in order to reach more traditionally living people the authors had to focus more on peoples from very specific regions (namely North Western Australia and the central deserts) so this cant be taken as the be all and end all on Aboriginal Mythology, though you will understand why as faith it was relatively fragile.

Finally if having a greater understanding of Aboriginal Mythology and culture isn't s something that interests you and you just want great stories or insight into ancient wisdom you probably won't enjoy this the stories are fairly short and repetitive.

[Javier Girona · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book by the Berndts is a magnificent piece of writing and research work, looking at 200 different myth stories from lots of different areas of Aboriginal Australia. It is a wonderful journey through human thought and behaviour, looking at the perspective of a unique group of people who shared a huge continent but had and have a similar and distinctive culture. This can be seen on the way they understood how the current world came to be, how humans emerged, how the natural environment existed and so on. In no way is a scientific approach to the creation of the world, but its poetic, nostalgic and full of meaning and understanding of the cosmos, which makes it a real pleasure to read.

It is a must read for anyone interested in myth and anthropology of Aboriginal Australia and also for those interested in general human thought and culture.

At times it is so alien, as it relates to a really isolated society, who lived on a semi nomadic, non-materialistic and really connected to nature society, really different from the western world, which is what most Goodreads readers have evolved from. But what is not surprising at all is that the themes touched on those stories are general human behaviours such as generosity, care for the young and the elderly, greed, selfishness and so on.

What is interested is the content and form of those stories explaining these common human behaviours, and of course the culture, which is alien in some ways to what we have experienced. Understanding the dreaming and the characters who lived that period, their characteristics, antagonistic to humans but also showing human behaviours, the symbology of those characters and their essential role in shaping the cosmos. I found that some of explanation on the symbology of the stories could have been provided, as this is the part I found most interesting, to unleash the labels of meaning hided on those stories. Nevertheless, reading this book providers the reader with some understanding of how Australia aborigines understood the world around them, what were their costumes, differences men and women, religious beliefs and so on.

A really recommended book, I enjoyed it so much!