Dreamtime Stories Retold: Re-invigorating Aboriginal Ecoconsciousness with Oodgeroo Noonuccal

Abstract

Stradbroke Dreamtime is the finest fruit of Oodgeroo Noonuccal's devotion to reinvigorate Aboriginal culture after she retired from politics. The book was published in 1972. It is divided into two parts: "Stories from Stradbroke" and "Stories from Old and New Dreamtime". Within this paper I have taken for discussion the second part of the book that consists of the collection of the mythical and Dreamtime stories of the Australian Aborigines. The target readers of the book are obviously children. At the same time, the selected myths betray the glimpse of the anxious environmentalist within the storyteller. The stories are indicative of the ecological wisdom of the ancestors of the Australian Aborigines. They advocate the concept of the human beings chosen by God as the steward of nature, which is being told by the modern ecocritics too. The intense knowledge about the proper method of maintaining the ecological balance has also been reflected through these stories. The matter of the choice of the stories to be included within the collection is also very significant.