In the Dreamtime, Ancestral Beings wandered through the desert, teaching law, language and ceremony to Aborigines living at isolated camps, and creating sacred sites at various places of significance which they encountered on their journeys. These ancestors were originally humans, but they could change their shape at will into birds, animals, reptiles or other natural phenomena such as rocks, hills or trees should danger threaten, or when they felt it was time for them to die. In this way their spirits would live on forever.
A large group of Emu ancestors (kalaya) left on one of their journeys to teach ceremony to people living in a clay pan west of Alice Springs at the Northern Territory and Western Australian border. They stayed there for some time drinking the water and walking around the clay pan, where they left their foot tracks so that people would know that this was a sacred site called the emu dreaming. After this they journeyed to Haasts Bluff and west again to Yulyturlyngu. Here they went into a large hole and travelled underground until they emerged again at the West Australian border.
All of their descendants paint their bodies with the emu design and mimic the events, which happened in the Dreamtime. Until recently this passing on of religious knowledge was only possible by song and dance cycles and by drawing tracks and other designs in the sand. Now this can also be depicted by painting on canvas.
