Aboriginal culture locates ‘Dreamtime’ as the beginning of all knowledge, from which came the laws of existence. All activities and ways of life- ritual, ceremony and duty relate to this ‘Dreamtime’. Knowledge concerning this beginning of time is sacred and passed down from one generation to the next via ceremony, stories, dance and imagery. Everything in the natural world is a symbolic footprint of the metaphysical beings whose actions created the world. As with a seed, the potency of an earthly location is wedded to the memory of its origin. After full tribal initiation, all men and some woman own a ‘dreaming’ and are thus charged with its custodial responsibilities to preserve and pass on this sacred knowledge.

It is believed that in the beginning Dreaming, three beautiful young woman came down upon the earth and went walk-about. As they ventured, from time to time they had to stop and pass water; where they did so, they left the sacred waterholes. If the mortal man drinks from these sacred waterholes, the liquid ingested would greatly enhance their ability to learn the Dreaming knowledge.

This process of gathering knowledge took men from their primal embryonic stage, in which they lived as the Inapatua: formless and shadowy beings with only traces of what they would become. The Numbakulla [two sky-brothers] decided the time had come and they descended knives in hand and re-shaped these plastic creatures into their final shapes of men and women and sent them off to populate Australia. Water is the essence of not only the physical life but also the spiritual.