Aboriginal Australian Eschatology (the Everywhen)

Across the hundreds of Aboriginal Australian societies there is, in the usual sense, no end of the world. The founding era, the Dreaming or the Everywhen, is not a past that finished but a present continuous. The ancestral beings moved through the land, named it, sang it into shape, and withdrew into it; their actions are renewed every time a songline is sung, a ceremony performed, a place visited. The world is not winding down toward a conclusion. It is being continually re-made by the very acts that describe its making.

This is the inverse of apocalypse. Where a last-day tradition accumulates a verdict and a termination, the Aboriginal cosmologies distribute creation across the whole of time. Death, drought and disaster are real, but they are events within the order, not signs that the order is ending. The land itself holds the ancestors; to look after it is to keep the world going, not to postpone its end.

Colonial writers often supplied an ending the record did not contain, reading the Dreaming as a lost golden age or a primitive eschatology. The evidence runs the other way. As the comparative essays argue for Egypt and Mesopotamia, the absence of a terminal date is not a gap in the record but what the record holds: catastrophe and cosmic threat are present, and an assembled last day is not. The world does not end. It is sung.

The regional variation is wide. In Arnhem Land the creative beings of the Dreaming are named and placed in particular country, and their journeys are the maps people still walk. In the centre, the travels of the ancestral totemic figures lay down the law and the land together. In each case the act of narration is also an act of creation: to tell the story is to bring the place and its order into being again. There is no separate eschatological register because the founding and the sustaining are the same act, repeated.

Colonial writers often supplied an ending the record did not contain, reading the Dreaming as a lost golden age or a primitive eschatology, and missions supplied a Christian last day where none had been. The evidence runs the other way. As the comparative essays argue for Egypt and Mesopotamia, the absence of a terminal date is not a gap in the record but what the record holds: catastrophe and cosmic threat are present, and an assembled last day is not. The land holds the ancestors, and to look after it is to keep the world going, not to postpone its end.