Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime

The Australian aboriginal people have lived in harmony with the earth for perhaps as long as 100,000 years, or since the First Day, as they describe it in their own words. In this absorbing work, Lawlor explores the essence of their culture as a source of and guide to transforming our own world view. While not romanticizing the past or suggesting a return to the life of the hunter/gatherer, Voices of the First Day enables us to enter into the mentality of the oldest continuous culture on earth and gain insight into our own relationship with the earth and to each other.

This book offers an opportunity to suspend our values, prejudices, and Eurocentrism and step into the Dreaming to discover a people who rejected agriculture, architecture, writing, clothing, and the subjugation of animals. Their lifestyle of hunting and gathering provided abundant food of unsurpassed nutritional value, and their initiatic and ritual practices hold the origins of all esoteric, yogic, magical, and shamanistic traditions.

The book also reveals a sexual and emotional life that afforded diversity and fluidity as well as marital and social stability, and a people who valued kinship, community, and the law of the Dreamtime as their greatest "possessions." The richness of their language's structure and vocabulary reveals new worlds of perception and comprehension, and a people balanced between the Dreaming and the perceivable world, in harmony with all species and living each day as the First Day.

Voices of the First Day is illustrated throughout with more than 100 extraordinary photographs, bark paintings, line drawings, and engravings, many of which are among the earliest ever made of the Aboriginal people and are shown here for the first time. This absorbing work offers an opportunity to step into the mentality of the oldest continuous culture on earth, and to gain insight into our own relationship with the earth and each other.

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