In 1788, when Captain Arthur Phillip raised the Union Jack on the eastern coast of Australia, he did not know that he had just entered a land that had at least 250 distinct languages. Potentially this meant that there were 250 unique ways to view the land and sea that indigenous Australians called home. Sadly many of these languages are now extinct, and many are in perilous condition with only a few speakers. Each language reflects its own cosmology, its own way of understanding the land to which it belongs. It is, therefore, dangerous to generalize about anything in indigenous Australia. Thus, in this description of indigenous Australian cosmology I will draw on two regional examples, one from the Yolngu-speaking people of northeast Arnhem Land and the other from the Yanyuwa people of the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria.

Indigenous people in many parts of Australia all use...