."Pay them and they will spin a great yarn for you." There are lots of people with an agenda that use the Aboriginal stories for their own reasons. I can prove one is a dream and not dreamtime. There is a sacred waterhole at Chinaman's beach near Evans Head with a dreamtime story that the local aboriginals talk about. That sacred waterhole was actually dug by my stepfather. The hole was dug as part of a sandmining operation in the dunes behind the beach. A dredge was used to mine the area by mining ahead and the waste pumped out behind. At the conclusion of the mining, the area mined was revegetated, the dredge moved to another location and the water hole left where the mining ceased. It was named Chinaman's Beach after a Chinaman mined the beach sands for gold in the early days. I also worked for the mining company and worked on the gold extraction from the sands that came from the mining of the dunes. Mining records from the late 1940s to 1950s would show this a fact. Fact, not dreamtime fiction. The government used to sell a few blocks of land on the headland overlooking the beach each year. A woman, Marg Henderson bought one. The next subdivision would have blocked her view and she set out to stop any more development. She came up with a story that the waterhole was a sacred site, the headland was also sacred. It's now called Goanna Headland. She got on to a group of Bunjalung people and she worked out a story that included the sacred waterhole. Government funding assisted in closing off the track to the beach and a viewing platform was built so that visitors could view this sacred waterhole. There is also a big billboard telling the story of the arrival by canoe of the first "settlers". Over time the next generations of Bunjalung people have believed the dreamtime story and made it a true story in their mind. Marg got her "dues" when a few or the unsold blocks beside her were given to aboriginals for aboriginal housing and the story is that she wasn't a "happy chappie" living there with her new neighbors..
