In indigenous Australia music and religion are discussed with reference to the concept of the dreaming. The term dreaming is an English way of describing the era of creation in indigenous Australian belief when great ancestral beings walked the earth, experiencing, interacting and creating landscape and life. A senior Yanyuwa man from the Aboriginal community at Borroloola in the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria of the Northern Territory explains the dreaming in the following way:

In our language, in Yanyuwa, we call the Dreaming Yijan. The Dreamings made our Law or narnu-Yuwa. This Law is the way we live, our rules. This Law is our ceremonies, our songs, our stories; all of these things come from the Dreaming.… The Law was made by the Dreamings many, many years ago and given to our ancestors and they gave it to...