The Dreaming is an Aboriginal chronicle.
A belief of how things happen. Why things are.
Origins of land and culture.
All beings have their Dreaming.
But Dream Time is time before time; space before space.
Transition of death raises things to Dream Time.
But there are spirits whose path is lost.
Trapped bunjips in the island of the dead.
Souls that must find Dream Time or terrible things will pass.
A Koori medium brings tranquility to such souls.
PROLOGUE
A RED-BROWN SKY EASED through the hush of a galaxy of independents, a place of chameleon stars that changed shape and color.
The sky roared, and broke silence. Sound became tri-color: lemon, plum and sapphire. The moon was spherical. Far different from the usual banana moon that shone night or day in a world that held many colors of the spectrum.
Ivory-eyed folk with ankle-length amethyst hair watched this full moon that dazzled until a mushroom wisp blackened the horizon. Strange smoke dimmed the lunar glow, ahead of a chase of cloud red as port.
Together, cloud and mushroom carried in a long wind. They swept a wave of destruction past an olive field, a dirt road, and a golden meadow on the other side of the road. The monstrous swirl tugged delicate rays from purple and white anemones, pushed licorice scent from vibrant yellow azaleas, squeezed mint off perennial Peruvian lilies, pressed yellow/green off aloe cacti, and red blush off hybrid magnolias with dramatic pointers.
Mama Pebble, an ancient woman struck by a bunjip’s curse, straightened her curling bones. Listless eyes rose half-blind to the phenomenon in the sky. She nodded unfazed, with little comprehension and no personal reason to nod, and lowered albino eyes almost at once to the ground, to a woven rug carrying variant twirls of sun-dried witchetty grub. The whirling cloud weaved past her ramshackle fenceway eaten by white ants, and tornadoed towards the Sacred Land of Dreaming.
Purple haired twin boys trapped in childhood paused from twiddling and tossing boomerangs, parrying with shields in hallowed ground at the far corner flatbed where cheeta peas grew. They watched a tumble of mushroom cloud in petrified silence, and remembered a beast that had reared its head and hissed. A cloud that became jaws. An ash man who sprinkled acrid dust to their toes, dust that oozed a stench of char grill and rot, before it brought madness to their mother, Mama Pebble.
But now, instead of soaring and bellowing above them as it had done eons ago, the thing from the skies tumbled with the aid of a gusty northerly wind towards wilderness. It pulled reeds and pebbles with it, knocking trunks off their stumps. The boys glanced at each other, once, twice, and with unspoken words: "Did? You? See?"; leapt and chased the destruction. They ran outwards towards the end of the world, yelling in half-formed voices trapped in adolescence.
By now the moon had fully dimmed. Total darkness cloaked the twins. They fell to their knees at the edge of the galaxy and watched the swirling blitz half a world away. There, in the distance, it swept inside the moon’s orbit to the neighboring land of Que, land of the back-footed people.
