alcheringa

See also: Alcheringa

English

Proper noun

alcheringa (uncountable)

1. Alternative form of Alcheringa
   • 1897, Baldwin Spencer, F. J. Gillen, “An Account of the Engwurra or Fire Ceremony of Certain Central Australian Tribes”, in Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria - Volumes 9-10, page 24:

     These ancestors are so intimately associated in the native mind with the animals or plants whose name they bore that an alcheringa man of, say the kangaroo totem, may be spoken of either as a man-kangaroo or as a kangaroo-man.

   • 1977, Percival Hadfield, The Savage and His Totem, page 56:

     In the alcheringa original ancestors lived who were believed to be closely related to the plants and animals whose names they bore.

   • 1980, Meanjin - Volume 39, page 402:

     No, Brian Elliott's hobby-horse is not the Jindyworobaks' political links—it is his conviction that they are to be remembered and well respected for their awareness of Aboriginal myth and legend and for their understanding and symbolic poetical use of the alcheringa concept (the Dreamtime myth of the creation of geological Australia and its flora and fauna with the related religious and moral connotations of site-worship and animism) .