I haven’t been online for a bit because I’ve been trekking through the desert! To celebrate my birth day I went to Central Australia to hear stories of Creation Time. I’ve been to Alice Springs, Uluru, Kata Tjuka, Darwin and Kakadu for the last couple of weeks. I haven’t really been in the rough since I stayed at resorts, but I thoroughly enjoyed getting red sand between my toes during the day.
The best part for me was the storytelling. I spent the whole time listening to stories from Aboriginal guides, reading stories from the ground, canvas, cave walls and books; and scrawling my own. I was thrilled to find that the system for Aboriginal oral storytelling (as far as I’ve been privvy to) has all the tropes that I’ve observed and come up with for cross-media storytelling. Amazing, and completely understandable. My experiences there have confirmed and extended my own theories and made me feel absolutely at home (in more ways than one).
The ‘systems’ that correlate are: having layers of complexity that are accessible according the age/knowledge of the audience, having an understood essence that can be retold in many ways (different details and media)…stories having a multifaceted function as archive, guide, law, invocation and healing.
I’ll discuss this further, but for now, I had a wonderful time and can’t wait to get back to the Anangu people.