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The Dreaming & Other Essays
W.E.H. Stanner's words changed Australia. Without condescension and without sentimentality, in essays such as 'The Dreaming' Stanner conveyed the richness and uniqueness of Aboriginal culture. In his Boyer Lectures he exposed a 'cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale,' regarding the fate of the Aborigines, for which he coined the phrase 'the great Australian silence'. And in his essay 'Durmugam' he provided an unforgettable portrait of a warrior's attempt to hold back cultural change. 'He was such a man,' Stanner wrote. 'I thought I would like to make the reading world see and feel him as I did.' The pieces collected here span the career of W.E.H. Stanner as well as the history of Australian race relations. They reveal the extraordinary scholarship, humanity and vision of one of Australia's finest essayists. Their revival is a significant event. With an introductory essay by Robert Manne. 'Bill Stanner was a superb essayist with a wonderful turn of phrase and ever fresh prose. He always had important things to say, which have not lost their relevance. It is wonderful that they will now be available to a new and larger audience.' - Henry Reynolds 'Stanner's essays still hold their own among this country's finest writings on matters black and white.' - Noel Pearson
304 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
About the author
W.E.H. Stanner
8 books4 followersW.E.H. Stanner (1905–1981) helped to shape the growth of Australian anthropology, and his principal interest was the peoples of Daly River and Wadeye in the Northern Territory. Until the end of his life, he devoted to securing recognition of Aboriginal rights to land. Stanner was a member of the Council for Aboriginal Affairs and, in 1968, the ABC's Boyer Lecturer. He was a founding member of the Aboriginal Treaty Committee. Appointed to the chair of anthropology at the Australian National University, he served as head of the department of anthropology and sociology until his retirement in 1970.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 7, 2026
W.E.H. Stanner is one of Australia’s greatest anthropologists to study First Nations peoples and cultures. He is widely remembered for his critique of the intellectual philistinism directed against First Nations people as their numbers dwindled under draconian imperialist policies. Selected Writings is a collection of Stanner’s essays and lectures written over his fifty-year career, which ended with his death in 1981. Renowned activist and academic, Marcia Langton, describes this volume as “the most literate and persuasive of all contributions on Australia’s Indigenous people.”
The book is 280 pages and comprises eleven chapters by Stanner, plus an introductory chapter by Robert Manne, Emeritus Professor of Politics at La Trobe University. The chapters are arranged thematically, rather than chronologically. This ordering traces how non-Indigenous Australia first ignored First Nations history and philosophy, then haltingly acknowledged it, and, by the time of Stanner’s later writings, perhaps began to reckon with it. Read collectively, the essays form a comprehensive anthology that would otherwise feel disjointed if temporally ordered.
Stanner began his career as a young anthropologist studying the Indigenous peoples of the Daly River in the Northern Territory in the 1930s. At the time, these people retained significant elements of their traditional way of life. Returning to this area over decades, Stanner bore witness to the dissolution of ancient traditions and to adaptation to a new reality. Despite this, First Nations people did not relinquish their worldview. Stanner’s willingness to learn to see the world as they saw it made him a pivotal figure in changing how white Australia viewed First Nations people.
The remainder of this column draws on two of Stanner’s enduring insights to examine past and ongoing relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people: Australia’s wilful and unconscious forgetfulness of historical and continuing injustices against First Nations peoples, and the First Nations concept of the Dreaming. This essay argues that the encounter between liberalism and the Dreaming has been structurally unequal, with state power determining what is recognised as legally valid First Nations ontology.
The plight of First Nations people had been widely documented by the press as the frontier of conflict gradually moved north-west across the continent over roughly 150 years. However, by the turn of the twentieth century, when colonial conquest was nearing completion, Aboriginal people were “scarcely mentioned, or mentioned only in passing” in official histories of Australia. In his 1968 ABC Boyer Lectures, Stanner famously described this phenomenon as the “Great Australian silence… a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale.”
How did this come about? Stanner posits that it was “a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape.” Australia was unconsciously in the midst of creating a national myth in which its founding was, and continued to be, purportedly underpinned by the principle of egalitarian, peaceful progress. Forgetting First Nations people was necessary to sustain this illusion in the face of the destruction of the first peoples way of life of this continent.
This structural permissiveness enabled white Australia “for so long to disremember the Aborigines that we are now hard put to keep them in mind.” Stanner concludes that “the things we were not told… were the things that mattered most.” These omissions include murder, rape, and dispossession, but also—remaining opaque to many non-Indigenous people to this day—the concept of the Dreaming and how, when it clashed with its antithesis, European worldviews, it shaped the politico-legal interpretation of First Nations responses to colonisation in non-Indigenous Australia.
To understand what was at stake in those clashes, it is necessary to understand what the Dreaming actually is. “The Dreaming,” according to Stanner, is “a kind of narrative of things that once happened; a kind of charter of things that still happen; and a kind of logos or principle of order transcending everything significant for Aboriginal man.” It is a philosophy that determines what life is and what it can be. Embedded within it is deep knowledge of the land, both its physical realm in terms of the earth, flora and fauna, and the metaphysical, in terms of relation to Country.
First Nations notion of social time is a cyclical continuum between past, present, and future that differs from linear conceptions of time. Because they see the world as a system that is “self-protective and self-renewing,” social life is calibrated to maintain this balance, resulting in a homeostasis that is far-reaching and stable. Rather than being a people without history, First Nations people had, in Stanner’s terms, ‘defeated’ it by structuring existence around return and continuity. It was a self-sustaining worldview, starkly contrasting with a liberal worldview defined by progressive rupture.
The preconditions of the post-historical system—”sufficient population, a self-sustaining economy, discipline by elders, [and] a confident dependency on nature”—were largely destroyed by colonisation. First Nations people adapted surviving traditional cultures to the new realities they faced. However, despite rhetoric portraying them as a “dying race,” such adaptive survival was deemed insufficient by the emerging Australian nation. A national policy of assimilation was therefore imposed on First Nations people.
Assimilation essentially amounted to the forced adoption of European beliefs and values, which, according to Stanner, constituted metaphysical erasure. Assimilation further disrupted the traditional way of life, leaving many, particularly those of the Stolen Generations, in a state of psychosocial upheaval or, as Stanner termed it, the “vertigo of living.” Nonetheless, First Nations people could simply not “un-be” or “cease being themselves.” Colonial resistance evolved and persisted in the refusal to internalise the colonisers’ worldview, even as material conditions deteriorated.
Centuries of conquest, followed by assimilation, had reduced many to living in squalor. This transformation in modes of living marked a moment of physical degradation. However, the Dreaming, which emphasised stability and continuity, remained intact at the level of belief, even as its material and social manifestations were fractured. For First Nations people, what emerged from the assimilationist nadir was a newfound assertion of ontological pluralism. It was precisely this stubborn persistence of belief that would fuel the legal and political contests to come.
Native title was beginning to emerge as an untested common law theory following the acceptance of the Yirrkala Bark Petitions by Parliament in 1963, following the establishment of a bauxite mine in Arnhem Land without consultation with the Yolngu Traditional Owners. A legal opportunity arose when the Mining Ordinance 1968 authorised another mining venture. The Yolngu people claimed it infringed their native title and challenged it. As Stanner notes, “as far as they were concerned, [the land] had been given to them by their spirit ancestors,” with their challenge going “to the very foundations of the common law.”
Through the liberal paradigm, the Crown’s response was that First Nations peoples had only occupied the land, and lacked systems of agriculture, land tenure, or political governance sufficient to ground ownership. By virtue of British arrival, under the legal fiction of terra nullius, the Crown essentially claimed to have imbued the land with labour and thus rights. They claimed to have transformed it into commercial property that was exchangeable at the discretion of private actors. What followed was an ontological clash, underwritten by power, that bore down upon First Nations peoples.
The Crown sought to have the Yolngu case summarily dismissed. However, Justice Blackburn observed that “the case put by the defendants and the case put by you have proceeded on a different basis of doctrine.” Yet despite this recognition of ontological incommensurability, Justice Blackburn ultimately ruled that “the doctrine of communal native title does not form, and never has formed, part of the law of any part of Australia.” However, he did find that there was such a thing as Aboriginal law that was tied to the land.
The Great Australian Silence had been jurisprudentially dented, even as common law remained sovereign. Rather than appealing to the High Court, where the conservative justices would likely reject Blackburn’s findings that Aboriginal law existed, a political option was sought with the new Labor Government. A Royal Commission was established, which laid the foundation for the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976—An Act providing for the granting of Traditional Aboriginal Land in the Northern Territory for the benefit of Aboriginals, and for other purposes.
First Nations people used this momentum to advocate for greater reforms, including a treaty, or makarrata, with the federal government, and even for regional autonomy, particularly in the Torres Strait. Labor, when back in government, promised a treaty at the Barunga Festival in 1988. After two centuries of colonisation, this promise, made on the lands of the Yolngu people who initiated the bark petitions—since likened by Clare Wright in importance to that of Australia’s Constitution and the Magna Carta—marked a moment of potential change.
In a telling sign, however, the government, under attack from the opposition and state governments, backed away from responding to demands for national recognition of land rights and a treaty. Despite this setback, continuing where the Bark Petitions had failed, Eddie Mabo argued that native title remained on the Murray Islands. This led to the ruling in the High Court in 1992: “The fiction by which the rights and interests of indigenous inhabitants in land were treated as non-existent is unjust and discriminatory. The common law of this country recognises a form of native title.”
This decision precipitated concerted action by the Keating government to recognise past injustices and attempt genuine reconciliation. In 1993, Keating explicitly acknowledged this in the Redfern Speech: “It begins, I think, with that act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion.”
Despite this advancement, ontological discrepancies were arguably further entrenched by the fact that native title was recognised only within liberal common law, particularly regarding notions of sovereignty. Henry Reynolds addresses this in his 2025 book Looking from the North. The High Court may have recognised native title, but by not explicitly recognising Indigenous law, this ruling effectively marginalised First Nations ontology in relation to sovereignty and its connection to the Dreaming. As I wrote in my review of this book:
The rest of the review can be found here: https://callumscolumn.substack.com/p/...
The book is 280 pages and comprises eleven chapters by Stanner, plus an introductory chapter by Robert Manne, Emeritus Professor of Politics at La Trobe University. The chapters are arranged thematically, rather than chronologically. This ordering traces how non-Indigenous Australia first ignored First Nations history and philosophy, then haltingly acknowledged it, and, by the time of Stanner’s later writings, perhaps began to reckon with it. Read collectively, the essays form a comprehensive anthology that would otherwise feel disjointed if temporally ordered.
Stanner began his career as a young anthropologist studying the Indigenous peoples of the Daly River in the Northern Territory in the 1930s. At the time, these people retained significant elements of their traditional way of life. Returning to this area over decades, Stanner bore witness to the dissolution of ancient traditions and to adaptation to a new reality. Despite this, First Nations people did not relinquish their worldview. Stanner’s willingness to learn to see the world as they saw it made him a pivotal figure in changing how white Australia viewed First Nations people.
The remainder of this column draws on two of Stanner’s enduring insights to examine past and ongoing relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people: Australia’s wilful and unconscious forgetfulness of historical and continuing injustices against First Nations peoples, and the First Nations concept of the Dreaming. This essay argues that the encounter between liberalism and the Dreaming has been structurally unequal, with state power determining what is recognised as legally valid First Nations ontology.
The plight of First Nations people had been widely documented by the press as the frontier of conflict gradually moved north-west across the continent over roughly 150 years. However, by the turn of the twentieth century, when colonial conquest was nearing completion, Aboriginal people were “scarcely mentioned, or mentioned only in passing” in official histories of Australia. In his 1968 ABC Boyer Lectures, Stanner famously described this phenomenon as the “Great Australian silence… a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale.”
How did this come about? Stanner posits that it was “a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape.” Australia was unconsciously in the midst of creating a national myth in which its founding was, and continued to be, purportedly underpinned by the principle of egalitarian, peaceful progress. Forgetting First Nations people was necessary to sustain this illusion in the face of the destruction of the first peoples way of life of this continent.
This structural permissiveness enabled white Australia “for so long to disremember the Aborigines that we are now hard put to keep them in mind.” Stanner concludes that “the things we were not told… were the things that mattered most.” These omissions include murder, rape, and dispossession, but also—remaining opaque to many non-Indigenous people to this day—the concept of the Dreaming and how, when it clashed with its antithesis, European worldviews, it shaped the politico-legal interpretation of First Nations responses to colonisation in non-Indigenous Australia.
To understand what was at stake in those clashes, it is necessary to understand what the Dreaming actually is. “The Dreaming,” according to Stanner, is “a kind of narrative of things that once happened; a kind of charter of things that still happen; and a kind of logos or principle of order transcending everything significant for Aboriginal man.” It is a philosophy that determines what life is and what it can be. Embedded within it is deep knowledge of the land, both its physical realm in terms of the earth, flora and fauna, and the metaphysical, in terms of relation to Country.
First Nations notion of social time is a cyclical continuum between past, present, and future that differs from linear conceptions of time. Because they see the world as a system that is “self-protective and self-renewing,” social life is calibrated to maintain this balance, resulting in a homeostasis that is far-reaching and stable. Rather than being a people without history, First Nations people had, in Stanner’s terms, ‘defeated’ it by structuring existence around return and continuity. It was a self-sustaining worldview, starkly contrasting with a liberal worldview defined by progressive rupture.
The preconditions of the post-historical system—”sufficient population, a self-sustaining economy, discipline by elders, [and] a confident dependency on nature”—were largely destroyed by colonisation. First Nations people adapted surviving traditional cultures to the new realities they faced. However, despite rhetoric portraying them as a “dying race,” such adaptive survival was deemed insufficient by the emerging Australian nation. A national policy of assimilation was therefore imposed on First Nations people.
Assimilation essentially amounted to the forced adoption of European beliefs and values, which, according to Stanner, constituted metaphysical erasure. Assimilation further disrupted the traditional way of life, leaving many, particularly those of the Stolen Generations, in a state of psychosocial upheaval or, as Stanner termed it, the “vertigo of living.” Nonetheless, First Nations people could simply not “un-be” or “cease being themselves.” Colonial resistance evolved and persisted in the refusal to internalise the colonisers’ worldview, even as material conditions deteriorated.
Centuries of conquest, followed by assimilation, had reduced many to living in squalor. This transformation in modes of living marked a moment of physical degradation. However, the Dreaming, which emphasised stability and continuity, remained intact at the level of belief, even as its material and social manifestations were fractured. For First Nations people, what emerged from the assimilationist nadir was a newfound assertion of ontological pluralism. It was precisely this stubborn persistence of belief that would fuel the legal and political contests to come.
Native title was beginning to emerge as an untested common law theory following the acceptance of the Yirrkala Bark Petitions by Parliament in 1963, following the establishment of a bauxite mine in Arnhem Land without consultation with the Yolngu Traditional Owners. A legal opportunity arose when the Mining Ordinance 1968 authorised another mining venture. The Yolngu people claimed it infringed their native title and challenged it. As Stanner notes, “as far as they were concerned, [the land] had been given to them by their spirit ancestors,” with their challenge going “to the very foundations of the common law.”
Through the liberal paradigm, the Crown’s response was that First Nations peoples had only occupied the land, and lacked systems of agriculture, land tenure, or political governance sufficient to ground ownership. By virtue of British arrival, under the legal fiction of terra nullius, the Crown essentially claimed to have imbued the land with labour and thus rights. They claimed to have transformed it into commercial property that was exchangeable at the discretion of private actors. What followed was an ontological clash, underwritten by power, that bore down upon First Nations peoples.
The Crown sought to have the Yolngu case summarily dismissed. However, Justice Blackburn observed that “the case put by the defendants and the case put by you have proceeded on a different basis of doctrine.” Yet despite this recognition of ontological incommensurability, Justice Blackburn ultimately ruled that “the doctrine of communal native title does not form, and never has formed, part of the law of any part of Australia.” However, he did find that there was such a thing as Aboriginal law that was tied to the land.
The Great Australian Silence had been jurisprudentially dented, even as common law remained sovereign. Rather than appealing to the High Court, where the conservative justices would likely reject Blackburn’s findings that Aboriginal law existed, a political option was sought with the new Labor Government. A Royal Commission was established, which laid the foundation for the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976—An Act providing for the granting of Traditional Aboriginal Land in the Northern Territory for the benefit of Aboriginals, and for other purposes.
First Nations people used this momentum to advocate for greater reforms, including a treaty, or makarrata, with the federal government, and even for regional autonomy, particularly in the Torres Strait. Labor, when back in government, promised a treaty at the Barunga Festival in 1988. After two centuries of colonisation, this promise, made on the lands of the Yolngu people who initiated the bark petitions—since likened by Clare Wright in importance to that of Australia’s Constitution and the Magna Carta—marked a moment of potential change.
In a telling sign, however, the government, under attack from the opposition and state governments, backed away from responding to demands for national recognition of land rights and a treaty. Despite this setback, continuing where the Bark Petitions had failed, Eddie Mabo argued that native title remained on the Murray Islands. This led to the ruling in the High Court in 1992: “The fiction by which the rights and interests of indigenous inhabitants in land were treated as non-existent is unjust and discriminatory. The common law of this country recognises a form of native title.”
This decision precipitated concerted action by the Keating government to recognise past injustices and attempt genuine reconciliation. In 1993, Keating explicitly acknowledged this in the Redfern Speech: “It begins, I think, with that act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion.”
Despite this advancement, ontological discrepancies were arguably further entrenched by the fact that native title was recognised only within liberal common law, particularly regarding notions of sovereignty. Henry Reynolds addresses this in his 2025 book Looking from the North. The High Court may have recognised native title, but by not explicitly recognising Indigenous law, this ruling effectively marginalised First Nations ontology in relation to sovereignty and its connection to the Dreaming. As I wrote in my review of this book:
Reynolds notes that the act of state doctrine bars judicial review of territorial claims. This was applied in Mabo, with one of the justices declaring that the acquisition of foreign territory was “an act of state which cannot be challenged, controlled or interfered with by the courts of that state.” Reynolds asserts that this “presents us with the extraordinary proposition that Australia’s highest court is unable to challenge a decision in the late 18th century on the other side of the world during the reign of George III.”
The rest of the review can be found here: https://callumscolumn.substack.com/p/...
February 9, 2013
This is a book that every Australian must be made to read. Forget about getting a tree at citizenship - give this book to every new Australian!
November 2, 2018
Stunning writing setting out the work and experiences of a European Australian (WEH Stanner, anthropologist, 1905-1981) with a perhaps unique and definitely thoroughly reasoned understanding of Aboriginal Australia. Neither I think a pessimist nor an optimist but someone of great experience and with exceptional clarity of vision, Stanner makes it just as clear what he doesn't or even can't know. Recommended to anyone with an interest in the matters of the Aborigines from the European occupation of Australia to the present and the future.
May 10, 2017
This needs to be required reading for all Australians. I don't know if I actually am, but I at least feel so very much more insightful about the endless intricacies of Aboriginal society, relationships, traditions and culture, and appreciate and understand the immense injustices of early colonial Australia a little more. Stammer writes with amazing empathy, incredible knowledge and great feeling. This collection of essays was hard to get through at times (that can be attributed more to my lack of experience in reading this kind of text than much else), but I feel very grateful that I came across this and strongly recommend it to anyone who doesn't have much knowledge or understanding of Aboriginal-white Australian relations in Australian history. I feel more like I've undertaken a university course in history, politics, sociology and empathy than simply read a book.
September 21, 2015
WEH Stanner: The Anthropologist as Humanist
[TBR]
Durmugam: A Nangiomeri
Definitely one of the more easier essays to read in this collection. I loved the narrative style and enjoyed what Stanner had to say. Durmugam is an interesting character for sure.
3.5 stars
The Dreaming
The vast complexity of the Dreaming is a concept that I will never be able to fully fathom. It is amazing to even get a glimpse of a culture so balanced and unchanging over thousands of years. Although Stanner can not possibly understand this concept in 100% detail, he does a good job of explained his own limited knowledge in a comprehensible way.
3.5 stars
The Aborigines
Interesting insight into the politics behind Aboriginal rights. Got a bit dry near the end though...
3 stars
Continuity and Change Among the Aborigines
I really like the anecdotes that Stanner includes in his essays. They make them so much more engaging.
3.5 stars
Aborigines and Australian Society
He raises some really good points.
3.5 stars
Aboriginal Humour
Interesting take on humour. Really enjoyed the anecdotes.
3.5 stars
[TBR]
Durmugam: A Nangiomeri
Definitely one of the more easier essays to read in this collection. I loved the narrative style and enjoyed what Stanner had to say. Durmugam is an interesting character for sure.
3.5 stars
The Dreaming
The vast complexity of the Dreaming is a concept that I will never be able to fully fathom. It is amazing to even get a glimpse of a culture so balanced and unchanging over thousands of years. Although Stanner can not possibly understand this concept in 100% detail, he does a good job of explained his own limited knowledge in a comprehensible way.
3.5 stars
The Aborigines
Interesting insight into the politics behind Aboriginal rights. Got a bit dry near the end though...
3 stars
Continuity and Change Among the Aborigines
I really like the anecdotes that Stanner includes in his essays. They make them so much more engaging.
3.5 stars
Aborigines and Australian Society
He raises some really good points.
3.5 stars
Aboriginal Humour
Interesting take on humour. Really enjoyed the anecdotes.
3.5 stars
July 13, 2018
What a man
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews