The Warlpiri have thousands of toponyms naming waterholes, hills, rocks, trees and creeks over a desert territory extending 600 kilometres north/south and 300 kilometres east/west. I only selected about one hundred places as examples of the intertwining structure of the perception of desert Aboriginal mythical and geographical space. The map is only a graph, a topological map, which shows points in relation to each others, as deduced from the stories included on the CD-ROM. People say: we needed two camps (ngurra) during the wet season to go from place A to B to the north, we would always stop in C on the way, to the west we could see the Dreaming trail of the Yam and to the east the trail of the Possum, and when we (or the ancestors) looked back south at midday we could still see the rock of D. There might be contradictions in cross- checking all the mythical stories and life-stories, not only because memory changes but also because geographical elements can shift: sand dunes travel with the wind, creeks can change their flow during floods, water which comes up when digging underground can disappear when soaks are dry. We tend to think that the physical order is permanent, but my understanding of the Warlpiri perception of desert space is that it is always moving, breathing they would say, even though the principles (the Dreaming as virtual life force) remain permanent.
The number of trails between two places is infinite; there are as many itineraries as there are ways to travel, track game or collect food. Metric distance is not necessarily meaningful in the desert; people measure space in time rather than kilometres. If travelling from one point to another at a given time, the time required might change according to the season, the size of the group, the age of the children, or the availability of resources. During the hottest season, people would sleep in the day. Sometimes they would dig themselves in the ground, heads covered with a shield or a dish so as not to be burnt, and they would rush through the night to cover as much distance as possible, especially if they knew that there were no water sources on the way. The perception of the desert expands and contracts accordingly—even today when travelling is done by four-wheel drive or by plane. In this sense, the Desert Dreaming web is an Indigenous mental representation of the ‘espace itinérant’ (itinerant space) of hunter-gatherers as opposed to the ‘espace rayonnant’ (radiating space) of sedentary cultures as represented in Genesis. But, contrary to Leroi-Gourhan’s (1964) idea of ‘espace itinérant’, repetition of travelling is not equivalent to a static perception of time and action. In the cognitive world of the Aboriginal hunter-gatherer the need for adaptation is also conceptualised.
Cognitive mapping and land rights
The graph of sites and trails in the CD-ROM does not pretend to be a real map with real distances, nor are the red lines of the trails real itineraries, because most Aborigines do not want to make public the location of many of their sacred places. To help protect these places, I have respected this concern.
The Warlpiri number around 4000 today, some living in Lajamanu, others in other communities, including Balgo in Western Australia. Traditionally they occupied this giant territory by travelling according to seasonal and climate changes. They were divided into groups of fluctuating size which were formed through descent, alliances and specific ritual and spiritual connections. Each man and woman shared with others the ritual custody of segments of trails (including some land, but not specifically tracts of land) around the sites which the trails connected. Men and women had to marry not