According to the legend, at the time of the
eternal Dream, at the age of Alcheringa, there was only one life
on earth, a motionless life, a gigantic embryonic transparent bulk,
made of a mixture of uncompleted beings, rough drafts of each animal
and plant species, the inapertwas. The whole becoming of humanity:
past, present and future of the world was there, pre-programmed
in this primordial matter. When he deemed it necessary, the supreme
Being, "The One who came from nothing, existed by Himself",
left one of the worlds of the sky to come down on earth and modify
this bulk. From his work the humans were born, in their present
shapes. Since then, each man, each woman is related to the animal
or plant it was born of.
 Gigantic
Entities associated with the sacred vital Force, fragments
of the supreme Intelligence -the Great Ancestors for the uninitiated-came
down from the worlds of the sky, sprang from the depths of
the earth or the sea and started to go throughout the length
and breadth of the world, then a simple flat immensity. In
all the human beings, in the animals, plants, but also in
the mineral, the air and water, they diffused their divine
Energy, making one single family of everything that lives.
Endowed with huge powers, they were able to take the appearance
of various forms of life and sculpted the plain in an Infinite
variety of landscapes and sprinkled It with watering places
and reserves of animals, plants and human spirits.
So
as to ensure the continuity of the species, they sprinkled reserves
of spirits for each of them. Hence the "baby-spirits"
of men would come to life by entering the body of a woman. The Great
Ancestors enacted laws and invented the techniques necessary for
the temporal life and many clever social systems and structures
which, taking into account human nature, would induce, in a flexible
but inescapable way, a system of enlarged kinship on the whole continent;
a behavior of mutual aid beneficial for the harmony of society.
 In
order to ensure the eternity of their Work, these Entities created
sacred sites, linked by tracks along which the different landscapes
sang their Feats. So as to guide the humans in the immensity of
their country, they created poems and told the humans to murmur
them along their pilgrimages from one site to the other, in order
to transform the track into a transcendental place which could bring
them into the Time of Creation.
They
established initiatory rites to enable all the mortals to remove
themselves from their animal gangue and become true-Humans, humans
who found wisdom again with a part of the memory of the One they
were at the beginning of time, their Dream. These rites enabled
some gifted ones, clever enough to go further in their quest, to
come close to the One they were and hence rise to the status of
Men of Knowledge, the medicine-men, personalities gifted with exceptional
intelligence and memory, endowed with infinite powers, Masters of
the Dream, mediums between the living and the dead, between the
temporal and the world of the Almighty Sky.
 These
very entities invented the ceremony rites which were to take place
on sacred sites. Rites which required dancing, rhythm, singing,
poetry, painting, which were not various forms of art but simple
techniques. Techniques which enabled the humans to enter furtively
in the model World and receive the help they needed to keep the
earth in the image of Dreamtime.
After they gave a very precise territory
to each people, and forbid them to leave it, the civilizing Heroes
asked the humans to be their Guardians and live as they were told,
so that this world they were offering would carry on. Then, though
they did not have enough time to make them perfect, they disappeared
in the sky, under the earth, in the watering places, in the rocks
where their intelligence and knowledge are still located and still
active.
Then,
in the tranquility of thousand years, cut off from the rest of the
world, with no real leaders and no social struggles, except the
occasional short fights for a watering place or the theft of a woman,
the Aborigines lived in harmony with their environment, feeling
on the earth like the child in his mother's womb. For thousand years,
they had time to think of "the place of Men in nature"
and to meditate on life in general. Their evolution did not cultivate
the positive imaginary of the sedentary people but led to the fulfillment
of an intuitive knowledge and a sensitivity to what the other forms
of life are transmitting, and the mineral, and the cosmos.
During their long initiating periods, punctuated
with physical and moral tests, after the death and rebirth tests,
and many others, according to their intellectual capacities and
their genius, they would go on a long quest to find the memory of
the Eternal Dream Time and finally discover which Great Ancestor
they were at the beginning of Time.
For thousand years, following the advices
received during their short communion with the beyond or transmitted
in their dreams, they updated their rites so that they would remain
efficient. Hence, always updated, the songs, dances, rhythms, poems,
paintings, these "techniques" taught by their civilizing
Heroes, brought the same fervor and efficiency they had in the fabulous
past of the Alcheringa age.
These
various forms of expression were therefore at the service of spirituality
and society, which were closely intertwined. During ceremonies,
they fitted into one another in order to form a group of  waves
which, when added to the fervor of the participants, enabled the
humans to reach a transcendence of short-lived paranormal powers
and communicate with the Invisibles. Only True-men and Knowledge
Men, the "medicine-men", could use these "tools".
When the celebration was over, the works did not represent anything
anymore for only the acts of the participants, the act of painting
for example, that is to say the moment when the artist is in communion
with the Model World, when he feels that his hand is guided by a
power from beyond, only this action is efficient. That is why the
huge totemic paintings drawn on the earth, painted on the body,
are wiped out once the ceremony is over.
The emotional force which emerges from the
pictorial art of the first Australians, which is from now on part
of the history of art, enables us to think that the Aborigine artist
of today works with the same belief in the existence of the Dreamtime
World, the certainty that he is one of the Heroes of the past. In
order to describe parts of the epic relating the achievements of
their Great Ancestor, their Dream, with symbols, with such talent,
and all that seen from above, must not they be in communion with
the Invisibles, for a short while, as they were in the past? That
is the feeling the visitors of the Federal Museum of Fine Art might
have experienced when they saw, opposite to a painting of Tiepolo,
a painting of the Western desert signed by the initiate Maxie Tjampitjinpa,
and noticed that from both paintings emerged the same transcendental
emotion.
The
greatness of the civilization of the First Australians was first
revealed by the talent of the painters. Their talent enabled them
to recover their past dignity, the dignity of the Guardian of Creation,
which has been theirs for thousand years; a status that has been
their reason of living, which more and more want to find again nowadays.
Let us hope that their ancestral wisdom, which is still alive in
some of them, will protect them from the dangers which threaten
their art, which is still sacred, but which might be tempted to
become, as many others, mercantile.
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