By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the role of myths in shaping the imagination of Australian Aborigines had become exceedingly difficult to determine. Various external forces have left their mark on this theme, and these forces have made Aborigines the subject of a project of mythologization that, in turn, has been appropriated by the Australian state. The multimillion-dollar Aboriginal arts industry, for instance, has turned mythic themes visualized on canvas into commodities and icons of national identity. Similarly, the spiritualization of the Aboriginal cosmo-ontology through marketable popularizations and simplifications—whereby Ancestral sites become conflated into "My Mother Earth," for example—has occluded the historical foundation of myths. This process presents a particular historical turn in itself, and raises questions about the likelihood and forms in which mythic themes may endure.

Since the late 1980s anthropologists have rarely centered their work on...