Perhaps the oldest oral library in the world was formed over a span of tens of thousands of years in the arid lands of central Australia. There, the Arrernte people developed a complex system of tribal knowledge, beliefs, duties, and ethics—what Van Gennep called, in his 1906 Mythes et légendes d’Australie, “at one and the same time fragments of a catechism, a liturgical manual, a history of civilization, a geography textbook [and] a manual of cosmography.” Indigenous Australians sometimes refer to this expansive system as their “Dreaming” and their “Dreaming stories.”
