Australian Aboriginal art is one of the oldest art traditions in the world to date. The most important wisdom of the indigenous society was passed on through different types of storytelling – as an oral tradition, as a dance or song, but also in painted stories. Traditional symbols are an integral part of contemporary Aboriginal art. The Aborigines have an old custom, in the context of which they use their traditional representations and symbols. Whatever surface these representations are applied to, be it the body of a person taking part in a ceremony or a sign, they have the power to charge people or objects with religious meaning and power. The contemporary artistic work of the Australian Aborigines also shows topics related to the dream time and often called dreamings. Dreamtime is the period in which fundamental creative acts were carried out by the first ancestors of human beings: spirits, heroes and heroines who created the pattern of nature and life and shaped the environment of man. Dreamtime is both a process and an era. It started when the world was young and unshaped, but never ended.

The ancestors who created preservation laws and patterns are still as alive today as they were at the time of their original actions. For the Aborigines, the sacred past, the Dreamtime, is also the sacred present, the Eternal Dreamtime, the eternal dream time. Dreamtime is often understood as an age, but this European concept of a period in the past does not include its actual meaning… Dreamtime is not a long past era, but a continuous entity from which people come, who renews people and to whom people return through dreaming. Art is a way for the Aboriginal people to communicate with the Dreamtime and to keep their unity with it.