Australian Aboriginal myths, also known as Dreamtime stories and Songlines, are the stories traditionally performed and told by the indigenous people of Australia. Each of the language groups across Australia has its own stories.
All the myths explain important features and meanings within each Aboriginal group's local landscape. They give cultural meaning to the Australian physical landscape. People who know these stories have access to the wisdom and knowledge of Australian Aboriginal ancestors back beyond the reach of memory.
David Horton wrote in the Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia that: "A mythic map of Australia would show thousands of characters, varying in their importance, but all in some way connected with the land. Some emerged at their specific sites and stayed spiritually in that vicinity. Others came from somewhere else and went somewhere else."
"Many were shape changing, transformed from or into human beings or natural species, or into natural features such as rocks but all left something of their spiritual essence at the places noted in their stories."
Australian Aboriginal myths have been described as parts of a catechism, a liturgical manual, a history of civilization, a geography textbook, and to a much smaller extent a manual of the world and the universe.
Antiquity
An Australian linguist, R. M. W. Dixon, collected many Aboriginal myths in their original languages. He discovered some landscape details in myths were the same as scientific discoveries being made about the same landscapes. For example, on the Atherton Tableland, myths tell of the origins of Lake Eacham, Lake Barrine, and Lake Euramo. Geologists have dated the volcanic explosions which formed the lakes, and were described by Aboriginal myth tellers, as having happened more than 10,000 years ago. Pollen fossil sampling from the bottom of the craters agrees with the Aboriginal myth-tellers' story. When the craters were formed, the area was eucalyptus forest, not the current wet tropical rain forests.
Dixon said that Aboriginal myths about the origin of the Crater Lakes might be accurate back to 10 000 years ago. Further investigation by the Australian Heritage Commission led to the Crater Lakes myth being listed on the Register of the National Estate, and included within Australia's World Heritage nomination of the wet tropical forests. It is an "unparalleled human record of events dating back to the Pleistocene era."
Since then, Dixon has found many similar examples of Australian Aboriginal myths that accurately describe landscapes of an ancient past. He particularly noted many myths telling of previous sea levels, including:
the Port Phillip myth collected by Robert Russell in 1850, described Port Phillip Bay as once dry land. The course of the Yarra River was once different, following the Carrum Carrum swamp. This was an oral history that accurately described a landscape from 10 000 years ago. the Great Barrier Reef coastline myth collected by Dixon in Yarrabah, south of Cairns, described the coastline which stood at the edge of the current Great Barrier Reef. It named places now completely covered by the sea This was an oral record that was accurate for the landscape 10 000 years ago. the Lake Eyre myths collected by J. W. Gregory in 1906, described Central Australia as a fertile, well-watered plains. The deserts around Lake Eyre were one continuous garden. This oral story matches geologists' understanding that there was a wet phase to the early Holocene when the lake would have had permanent water.
Aboriginal mythology: Whole of Australia
There are at least 400 Aboriginal groups across Australia. Each group has its own name, its own language and often their own dialects. Each group had its own myths, and the words and names of individual myths come these language groups.
With so many different Aboriginal groups, languages, beliefs and practices, it is not possible to describe under a single heading, the full range and diversity of all myths across the entire continent.
The Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia does however note that "One intriguing feature [of Aboriginal Australian mythology] is the mixture of diversity and similarity in myths across the entire continent."