the connected songs associated to the painting.4 Warlpiri call their paintings kuruwarri, a word which is also a synonym of Jukurrpa, Dreaming and story; signs are called yirdi, print, word or song verse.
The CD-ROM presents 100 canvas paintings with commentaries. For each Dreaming there are many photos and films of ritual painting and dancing, oral recordings of one or several story-tellers in Warlpiri with written translations of his or her version of the myth. Each story is also presented through a selection of songs by women and some men, the verses of which are transcribed and translated. Such song- lines are cryptic and condensed versions of the stories. Some verses sound like a long word, which is often the Dreaming name of a live or dead person. Warlpiri, and some of their neighbours, consider that each person embodies the spirit of such a song verse: it is the verse that gives the baby the power to ‘articulate’ both speech and motion.
There are many ways to tell stories, to develop different angles, interpretations, and connections, according to one’s own style and experience. Even new episodes can be added: Warlpiri say they can communicate with the eternal ancestors who sleep in the sacred sites when their spirit travels in their own dreams—especially when they sleep in these sites. All the sleepers of one camp are often asked to share their dreams as their collective experience is considered to be ‘the same dream’. When it is recognised, through the interpretation of a dream, that the dreamers travelled in the space-time of a given Dreaming, the dreamers’ vision can be materialised through a new song, a painted design or a dance. Such dream creativity is seen as information given by the Dreaming virtual memory, even though it may be an adaptation of a recent event that affected the living. From the Dreaming point of view it is ‘actualised’ by Jukurrpa, the virtual matrix and its ancestral inhabitants. The Dreaming is not a golden age or an eternal repetition of something without past or history. Just like the evaluation of space in the desert is relative to the speed at which you can travel, the perception of time is relative to the way you treat an event: sometimes it is to be forgotten or temporarily avoided because of a death or a conflict, at other times it is to be remembered and transformed to be projected in the future and set as an example.
People’s actions can be used to confront new problems. Traditionally such problems might have included a drought, a cyclone, a demographic fluctuation, the need to change seasonal routes because of the unavailability of resources, when people were too numerous in one place or when a drought lasted several years. All this change had to be managed in a way that could be authenticated by the ancestors, that is explained in the spiritual Law system which allocates places to people but also legitimates their sharing of common rights in some places. It is this ancestral logic that allowed the temporary gathering of several hundred individuals in the same place, while most of the time they travelled in very small family groups.
The fact that this flexibility was recognised as part of the dynamic structure of the Dreaming trails is extremely important today when land claims are subject to royalty payments. Shortly after the Warlpiri won a land claim over part of their traditional territory in 1978, mining companies were attracted to look for gold (an activity which
4    It is the same with the Warlpiri hand-sign language in which signs are distinguished not just by their shape but also by their movement. Over 4,000 signs have been recorded in this language so far. Some examples (of totems and kinship terms) are shown in the CD-ROM.