Free HSC Studies of Religion Flashcard Review

The central and deepest reality of Aboriginal spirituality: the metatemporal origin, meaning and law of all existence, in which Ancestral Spirit Beings formed the land, living things and the moral order, and continue to be present in the land. It is not a past event but an ongoing reality, and it determines kinship, ceremonial life and obligations to the land and people.

Stanner coined 'everywhen' to convey that the Dreaming cannot be placed on a Western timeline — it is at once ancient, current and eternal. Use it as terminology to show the Dreaming is metatemporal, and pair it with a concrete example such as an Ancestral Being still present in a landform.

The routes travelled by Ancestral Beings across the country, recorded in song, dance, story and art. A songline maps sacred sites in sequence, so singing it both retells creation and functions as navigation and law. Songlines cross the territories of many groups, requiring shared custodianship and cooperation between clans.

A natural species or object that identifies a person, clan or moiety with a particular Ancestral Being and with a specific tract of country. The totem creates a kinship relationship with that species, generating obligations to protect it, restrictions on eating or harming it, and responsibility for the ceremonies that sustain it.

The complex network of relationships, derived from the Dreaming, that places every individual within the group and determines their obligations, marriage partner, totem, ceremonial role, and rights and duties in relation to particular country. Kinship is not simply family — it structures the whole of social, economic and religious life.

Kinship categories were themselves laid down by the Ancestral Beings, and each person inherits a totem and a stretch of country through their kinship position. So one's place in the kinship system is simultaneously one's place in the Dreaming: it dictates which Dreaming stories they may learn, which sites they care for and which ceremonies they perform.

The body of rituals — rites of passage, initiation, mourning, increase and cyclical ceremonies — through which adherents re-enter the Dreaming, re-enact the acts of the Ancestral Beings, and renew the land, the law and the group's identity. Ceremony is how the Dreaming is made present, transmitted and sustained.

Ceremony re-enacts the actions of the Ancestral Beings, so participants do not merely commemorate creation but enter and renew it. Body designs, songs and dances reproduce the Dreaming as given, the ritual takes place on the site where the events occurred, and the roles are allocated by the kinship system the Dreaming established.

The duty, inherited through kinship, to care for a specific area of country and its sacred sites: performing the ceremonies that renew the land and its species, protecting sites from damage or unauthorised entry, managing resources sustainably, and passing custodianship on. Failing these duties is a breach of Dreaming law.

Kinship assigns each person both their relatives and their country, so caring for kin and caring for country are the same duty seen from two sides: ceremonies for the land require the right kin, and the resources that sustain kin come from country held in custodianship. Damage to either relationship disturbs the balance established in the Dreaming.

Separation from the land, separation from kinship groups, and the Stolen Generations. A full-mark answer treats each as a continuing effect on Aboriginal spiritualities — loss of access to the Dreaming through country, breakdown of the kinship structure that carries it, and the intergenerational break in transmission — not as a history lesson.

Its consequences persist in measurable disadvantage in health, life expectancy, education, employment, imprisonment and child-removal rates, in the ongoing loss of languages and ceremonies, in unresolved land claims, and in intergenerational trauma. Exam answers must argue from present-day consequences, not conclude the story at 1788 or 1967.

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children forcibly removed from their families under government and church policies of protection and assimilation, principally across the period from about 1910 to 1970, and placed in institutions, missions or non-Indigenous foster and adoptive homes with the explicit aim of separating them from their culture.

Removed children were denied their totem, their country, their Dreaming narratives and their place in the kinship system, and could not be initiated at the appropriate stage. Many were forbidden their language and raised in Christian institutions, so on return they lacked the knowledge and standing to take up custodial and ceremonial duties.

Relocation to reserves put unrelated groups on foreign country, which weakened kinship and made site-based ceremony impossible; weakened communities were then more vulnerable to child removal; and removed children could neither learn nor transmit the Dreaming. Each effect deepens the others, which is why a strong answer links the three rather than listing them.

Latin for 'land belonging to no one'. The legal fiction on which British settlement of Australia proceeded from 1788, holding that the continent was unoccupied or that its inhabitants had no recognisable system of law or land ownership, so that sovereignty and title passed to the Crown without treaty, purchase or compensation.

Because the claim is not for economic assets but for the return of the specific country in which the Ancestral Beings remain present. Land rights restore access to sacred sites, allow ceremonies to be performed again, and permit custodial obligations to be met, so the movement is best analysed as a religious campaign expressed in legal and political form.

The High Court decision of 3 June 1992 that rejected the doctrine of terra nullius and held that native title survived the acquisition of sovereignty where a group had maintained continuous connection with land under traditional law and custom, and where that title had not been extinguished by a valid inconsistent grant such as freehold.

The High Court decision, handed down in December 1996 by a 4-3 majority, that the grant of a pastoral lease does not necessarily extinguish native title. Native title rights and the rights of the pastoralist may coexist on the same land; where the two conflict, the rights granted under the pastoral lease prevail.

Land rights and native title respond to separation from the land by restoring access to country and sacred sites; Link-Up, language and cultural programs respond to separation from kinship by rebuilding the networks that transmit the Dreaming; and the Bringing Them Home recommendations, Sorry Day and the National Apology respond to the Stolen Generations. Structuring an answer this way shows the syllabus links explicitly.