“My spirit know the way to place where I been born – it travels like kiirr-kiirrpa (hawk) to my ngurra – that’s my “Patjuntjari” (dream spirit journey). (*Jimmy, traditional Mapantjara/ shaman)



I first encountered the phenomenon of “dream flying” during a field trip to Wiluna in January 1975. It was late December, the hottest time of the year, when I arrived at Bondini Reserve after a long arduous two day drive from Mt Margaret Mission. I was driving a truck loaded up with Aboriginal people and their belongings, who were attending the annual Nga-waji rainmaking ceremony at Bondini, an Aboriginal reserve settlement located about three kilometres east of the township of Wiluna on the legendary Gunbarrel Highway. Desert people from as far afield as the Docker River, Jigalong and Balgo were to be attending this event.

I was accompanied on the trip by a Warburton Lawman who acted as my guide and informant during the journey to Wiluna. On the journey down Peter (an alias) seemed to be preoccupied with something that was troubling him. When I inquired what was wrong, he replied that he felt anxious that something had happened to a member of his family back at Warburton. When we arrived at Wiluna, Peter rang his community from the police station and received the news that his father was ill. He murmured something, which I found inaudible, that he would visit his father to check on his condition later. I thought, did I hear him say this because there was no way he could travel all the way back to Warburton that night, driving about eight hours straight over one of the most rugged roads in the world.

I met him the next morning at about 8.30am at the Reserve where he told me that he had flown home the previous night to check on his father’s condition. I sceptically asked him ‘Is your father recovering from his illness?’ ‘Oh Yes’, he said. ‘He ‘s walking around now and feeling much better.’  It was not until some eighteen years later that I came across by chance another night dream ‘spirit flight’ phenomenon. This time I wanted to understand how one could achieve this extraordinary night-time mission.

A conversation I had before the meeting with two senior Lawmen who identified themselves as Mapantjara shaman led me to believe that ‘dream spirit flights’ were almost as common as driving one’s car through the bush.

All my Aboriginal advisers had been born and raised in the desert country north or northeast of Wiluna on the Canning Stock Route, Carnegie, and Munkalyi. During the meetings which took place over a two day period the group frequently talked about going ‘back to their country’ at night by patjuntjari. Tonkinson (1970:260) in Australian Aboriginal Anthropology (edited by Ronald Berndt) records this same term at Jigalong as badjundjari. It would seem that this was a customary practice in settlements, such as at Wiluna and Jigalong, where initiated males received knowledge of how to fly in a lucid dream state back to their home country. To my consultants patjuntjari was as normal a means of visiting country as walking or driving, especially when it was not possible for them to visit their country physically because of the tyranny of distance and other cultural commitments. The term ‘astral flight’ was never used at any time during our meetings by myself or my advisers. They referred to their nightly sojourns to country as patjuntjari or mungarti purnpurpa ‘night flying.’

“We blackfellas say that every night a man sleeps, his spirit walk about all over the fucking place — but if he look hard [focus] and think about his ngurra country before he sleeps– and sing the song for that ngurra- he will go along that country.” (W.W. 1975)

“I can see my country now if I close my eyes – but if you wanna go ta yer country in your dreams you gotta sing that song real hard in your head longa time, don’t stop.” (W. L. 1975)

“When you sing that song for your country – you will go longa your country. I been go longa time pilot me.”

“Me spirit know the way to country I been come from – it been travels like a hawk to that place – that’s my Patjuntjari” (dream spirit journey). (Peter Go-Go 1993)