Australian fantasy revisited

Australia's Aborigines possessed a rich cultural heritage dating back more than 55,000 years by the time British colonization began in the late 1700s (Davis, 2009). The British invaders could not comprehend the worldview of the Aborigines, whose hunter-gatherer culture emphasized preservation of the varied environments they occupied across the continent. Native traditions of walking, singing, and, most importantly, dreaming both created and maintained the world's existence since the first dawn. Aboriginal cosmology differed so drastically from the colonists' that it posed an insurmountable intellectual challenge. One such study documented rites of passage from boyhood to adulthood among Aborigines in southern Australia. Initiation rites, often associated with puberty, are common and vary cross-culturally to formally acknowledge boys' and girls' change in developmental and social status. (PsycINFO Database Record