I'm not talking about a feathered serpent, I'm talking about the Rainbow Serpent. It made Australia. It slithered up into the physical world from the Dreaming and dug the riverbeds with its tail. It pushed up earth from the rivers to make the mountains. It did so to create a home for all of the plant and animal spirits, out of genuine selfless kindness.

There are hundreds of Rainbow Serpent stories, but that's the basic gist of it in most places. Where I live, Indigenous people do not think of themselves as masters of the land and the ecosystem. They think of themselves as carers. Relationships with plants and animals are viewed as consensual agreements, dependent on continued responsibility, forged in the time before time, by the spirits that would become living things. Just as the Rainbow Serpent created a home for humans and other living things out of kindness, so too do humans have a duty to reciprocate that kindness for the natural world and the spirits of the Dreaming. This is a philosophical framework in which humans and nonhumans are viewed as equal partners.

Which goes some way to explaining why there are no historical records of precolonial warfare in this region of Australia. There are records passed down from 10,000 years ago when the ice age ended and the sea rose, which have been verified by science as accurate. But no records of war between Aboriginal nations.

The Trojan War was considered so important to the Greeks that we still remember it today, 3000 years after the Bronze Age collapse (which is when historians think it probably happened). There are no such histories here. If war happened, it wasn't considered a great thing like it was in Greece. It wasn't remembered.

A people who are smart enough, who have advanced enough knowledge of psychology and politics, can intentionally design a religion and a social structure that creates peace. You say peace isn't understood by anyone anywhere? It's understood perfectly well right here in Australia. And Aboriginal religion is a key technology for sustaining it.