Wade Davis
spent time in the Northern Territory of Australia, working on a film with the
Aboriginees on Dreamtime and the Songlines. He reports from his time there: "I must tell you of the Dreaming. Spent
a month in the Northern Territory. Here's a copy of the note that I sent back
in week three, from a sat phone at a waterhole 200 miles east of the road in
Arnhem Land. “These are and were a people with no notion
of linear time. Theirs was one of the great experiments in human thought. The notion
that the world existed as a perfect whole, and that the singular duty of
humanity was to maintain through ritual activity the land precisely as it
existed when the Rainbow Serpent embarked on the journey of creation. The logos
of the Dreaming were constancy, balance, symmetry. In the moment there is deductive logic, on a
hunt for example, when the men pay attention to signs with a perceptiveness
that would put Sherlock Holmes to shame. But in life there is only the
Dreaming, in which every thought, every plant and animal, are inextricably
linked as a single impulse, the inspiration of the first dawning. Had humanity
followed this track, it is true that we would have never placed a man on the
moon. But we would most certainly not be speaking of our capacity to compromise
the life support of the planet. I have never in all of my travels been so moved
by a vision of another possibility, born literally 55,000 years ago. This world is so amazing. The realm of the
modern is just the floss. The ancient rhythms resonate in ways we can only
imagine."