DREAMKEEPERS: A Spirit-Journey Into Aboriginal Australia ...

DREAMKEEPERS: A Spirit-Journey Into Aboriginal Australia by Harvey Arden ($14; 219 pp., illustrated). Arden roamed the Kimberley region of Northwestern Australia, talking to Aboriginal elders about the Dreamtime, the amalgam of religion, myth, history and cosmography at the center of Aboriginal culture. Some subjects dismissed his inquiries, but Aboriginal leader Reg Birch explained, “We never looked back at it. The Dreamtime, I mean. It’s now, you know? It’s not some other time. It’s here and now going on all around us. The Dreamtime never stopped!” Arden treats the people he encountered and their beliefs with respect, but an editor should have restrained his tendency to overload an otherwise interesting text with a plethora of Dreamtime references: “the road to the Dreamtime,” a girl with “a smile as big as the Dreamtime,” etc.