Voices of the 1st Day: Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime

Rating:
Summary: Good Reading
Review: A great resource for those interesting in the culture of the Australian Aborigines, this book has a very strong focus on the religion, shamanism and spirituality which is so central to indigenous culture. Lawlor pays alot of attention to the kin relations, totems, ancestors, initiation rites and the Dreamtime. Anyone with some interest in the indigenous people of Australia should check this book out. There are only a couple of flaws with this book. One, is that it goes into great detail about traditional Aboriginal beliefs without paying attention to modern day continuation and adaptation of Aboriginal beliefs. Another is that Australia is so large and diverse that its hard to make any generalization about Aboriginal culture. However, these are only minor issues. The book itself is great.

Rating:
Summary: Hoax!
Review: I have worked and lived with Aboriginal people in The Northern Territory for the last 10 years and the stuff Lawlor writes is akin to the fiction of "mutant message down under". Beware, what is contained within these pages bears no relationship to the real thing. Only through learning language and understanding culture through this will you receive the smallest glimpses of the spiritual lives of Aboriginal people. Sacred and secret knowledge is well safeguarded through a strict system of law.
I see this FICTION is totally Robert Lawlors dreaming.

Rating:
Summary: Compelling, authoritative, insightful; a must to read.
Review: I read Voices when it first came out. I contacted Lawlor, and subsequently took him to the remote Kimberley region of Western Australia to meet with eminent Ngarinyin Lawman the late David Mowaljarlai and his countrymen. Robert Lawlor has written the most comprehensive, authoritative book on Aboriginal spirituality in life. It is masterful. He encouraged me to write a book on my own knowledge and experience with the Ngarinyin people. This I did. Men's Business Women's Business: The Spiritual Role of Gender in the World's Oldest Culture published by Inner Traditions International (US)was inspired by Voices of the First Day. Unlike many who write about Aboriginal culture and philosophy Robert's diligent attention to authenticity is unsurpassed. This book has my unequivocal recommendation. A modern masterpiece.

Rating:
Summary: Hokum
Review: It's hard to be too hard on this pretentious wad of snarling anti-reason, bleary new-age fog, wishful thinking, truely impressive ignorance of the genuine diversity of aboriginal cultures everywhere, or the centrality of Western science and reason to any successful human(e) endeavor in today's world. This book is an achievement of sorts -- many tin-type pictures; an out-of-date bibliography; an angry and assertive posture characteristic of the most herniated PC hype, guaranteed to appeal to a certain "cultivated" mindset; nice drawings and maps. This book is typical of current POMO (post-modernist) "historical" nonsense in a pretty package, a pastiche of the visually appealing with the intellectually bankrupt. Bruce Chatwin redux..

Rating:
Summary: At Least it Gets You in the Door
Review: Mr. Lawlor did a lot of research in preparing his book. He manages to extract a lot of anthropological data and present it in an interesting, readable fashion, particularly in the second section of his book on Aboriginal folkways. Perhaps the data is out of date, as some other reviewers have indicated; I really can't say, but the parts of the book dealing with this at least seem reasonable.

Unfortunately, once Mr. Lawlor departs from the straight and narrow you'll find yourself in a world of truly bizarre speculations on the nature of dreamtime, Aboriginal sensitivity to the magnetic field of the earth, the continent of Mu and all other sorts of lunatic New Age stuff, all of which pull the rug out on whatever parts of this book are arguably informative.

At best, one can say that books like this serve some purpose in that they inspire a new generation to go into anthropological research, rather like the old "Flash Gordon" serial no doubt inspired some people to go into nuclear physics. For this reason I'll give the book two stars. It could've been worse, as readers of "Mutant Message" would know.

Rating:
Summary: At Least it Gets You in the Door
Review: Mr. Lawlor did a lot of research in preparing his book. He manages to extract a lot of anthropological data and present it in an interesting, readable fashion, particularly in the second section of his book on Aboriginal folkways. Perhaps the data is out of date, as some other reviewers have indicated; I really can't say, but the parts of the book dealing with this at least seem reasonable.

Unfortunately, once Mr. Lawlor departs from the straight and narrow you'll find yourself in a world of truly bizarre speculations on the nature of dreamtime, Aboriginal sensitivity to the magnetic field of the earth, the continent of Mu and all other sorts of lunatic New Age stuff, all of which pull the rug out on whatever parts of this book are arguably informative.

At best, one can say that books like this serve some purpose in that they inspire a new generation to go into anthropological research, rather like the old "Flash Gordon" serial no doubt inspired some people to go into nuclear physics. For this reason I'll give the book two stars. It could've been worse, as readers of "Mutant Message" would know.

Rating:
Summary: Buy it for the Bibliography!
Review: On first reading, a lot of the statements Mr. Lawlor makes early on in the Intro and first few chapters seemed really strange. I had trouble buying the argument. But after reading the whole book, and some of the source material, it is much clearer to me that this is an important contribution to changing the metaphors we use to perceive the world. Lawlor is an artist as well as a scholar. And his bibliography is wild! One could learn a LOT just following its trail through Sheldrake and Hoyle, Elkin and Campbell. Which would lead to Levi-Strauss, Jung, Eliade, Bohm, Prigogine, and maybe Larry Dossey, Robert Moss...

Rating:
Summary: A Treasure
Review: Robert Lawlor has an incredible ability to bridge between cultures. His descriptions of Aboriginal perceptual reality made exquisitely good sense to my rational mind and at the same time relaxed its rigidity and stretched it. Voices of the First Day had the effect of evoking what I felt like I already knew and always had known but had merely forgotten. For me it was the book of a decade, one of my half-dozen of most treasured volumes.

Rating:
Summary: Voices still haunting me...
Review: This is the single finest book, leading to a slew of other great books (biblio) one could ask for regarding humanity on this earth. I was surprised to read the negative reviews above, but thats typical of the Humanist dogma we've all been steeped in for so long - people don't even have the patience or capacity to try and understand anything beyond their McMac and what FOX tells them: 10,000 Years of Progess and Civilization Good; naked humans living on earth for 2 Million years Bad. (and by the way...Mutant Message was formed almost entirely after Lawlor's work, not the other way around, not to mention that M.M. did not ring true to me). Lawlor takes the modern ego to the hoop and 360 dunks it.

A prime reason you know this work is great (not perfect) is that Lawlor essentially destroys the idealism he wrote naively of in his grossly idealised "Sacred Geometry" - Though containing truths about Egypt, it's as soaked in the fallacy that Egypt was little more than sacred, peaceful people living fully with nature, floating from temple to temple in robes with all the knowledge of the universe - as if the Egyptians did not cut all the timber, drain all the wetlands, overgraze all the grasslands, put 1000's of plants and animals into extinction, mine out all the precious minerals, enslave all known peoples, and blast a desert out of what was once a lush subtropical region. He dumps much of this with "Voices" in finding the earth and its peoples who never - and still don't - do such nonsense.

Not a single day has passed since 1991 when I read this book, that I've not been influenced by the ideas of this book - it has completely altered the course of my and my wife's life in a way that has allowed us both greater capacity to live in an with nature (and she's a skeptical anthropologist / socialist type - now incorporatse Lawlors work in her classes). My botanical / wildlife background was great and fulfilling, but this book helped me blow the conceptual lid off of my relationship with the natural world,as well as liberate most of the conceptual fallacies about teh greatness of modern life I'd been suckled on (which you'd likely be suspect of to even finish this book.)

He makes clear that people who live in nature are truly the masters in it and not a bunch of 'savages'. He does seem to idealize the aborigines a bit much though, but still makes clear that the concepts he presents about would equally apply to others around the world.

And to all you hard hearted skeptics out there, consider how soft we all are in this wimpy modern world where we continue to yank the rug out from under ourselves daily, replacing with an All New, Improved, Better Than Ever Wonder-Rug - Guaranteed to be better than the last!!! Lawlor challenges us on the fact that as individuals, none of us are capable of designing, creating, and maintaining any of the technologies that surround and sustain us (not to mention, be able to do anything from the past)- were we to do so, I'd bow down and swear that we were actually advanced peoples. The H/G's individually can provide all their food, water, shelter, and needs period - without need for such silly, globally complex and life destroying actions we don't even seem to know or care about that result from our way of life. I think he shows well that they are the masters of this earth, internally and externally. We're mostly just adolescents.

Lawlor blows us to bits with the fact that not 99% but 100% of human existence includes hunter / gatherers - they were here 2M, 1M, 500K, 100K, 50K, 10K years ago, 100 years ago and nearly extinct as you read this - BUT STILL HERE. Our pathetic, cancerous mess has been around in the form of agriculture of various forms for less than 10K years - and its impacts are clear. Certainly, a people who can live in Nature are stronger, smarter, and more stable than the plastic people we've become. To most people in this society - that something or someone has not changed means it has not progressed; of course, their culture is always changing, its just that we don't understand any of it to observe the changes. But the fact that they're still living much as their ancestors did even 50K years ago is evidence of a solid, stable way of life rather than the 30 second commercial zip/zap changing we come to expect and label as progress.

Lawlor has given me faith that the past 10K years will peak and be done and those humans - the meek that will inherit the earth (and I ain't one of them) - are the hunter / gatherers and that they will resume after this lame party of civility is over.

Rating:
Summary: Voices of Fantasy
Review: Where are the real Aboriginal people, where are their voices? All i see here is the voice of a white man. The idea that he could "penetrate the consciousness" of Aboriginal people is offensive and ridiculous. Aboriginal people can speak for themselves and do not need distorted readings of out-of-date ethnographies to represent their cultures (and it is 'cultures' - there were over 500 Aboriginal nations in Australia, too many to be represented by a book like this).