THE LAST WAVE Explained: A Time of Dreaming

The forces of nature watched over mankind equally and threatened him, while the sages and priests knew the rhythm of nature and lived in accordance with it, merging with it as one and sinking into the time of dreaming. And then the white man felt victorious. He believed that his destiny and mission was to subjugate all tribes. He stopped trusting the spirits. He stopped trusting his dreams, and the dreams abandoned him. The Last Wave

Meanwhile, nature continued on its course, revolving in a circle. It inevitably moves towards the moment when the cycle will close—and a new era will begin. How will we protect ourselves from nature’s revenge, we who have stopped listening to its warnings?

The Aboriginals believe that human life runs along two lines. One line is our physical reality, ordinary sensory perception. The second line is the time of dreaming. Dreaming is the truth. In it, there are no artificial norms or boundaries, nothing that civilization would impose. There are values beyond time, ideas of the origins of creation, eternal laws above the law.

A mind of great power and great openness can penetrate the mysteries of dreaming, read the signs, and even predict the future. The visions of the priests announce that nature is ending its cycle, that a catastrophe will occur, and after it, there will be rebirth. The line of our real perception will break with the apocalypse, but the time of dreaming is eternal and unchanging, it will preserve what we truly are, it will safeguard those who can trust it, surrender to the guidance of dreaming, and show enough humility before the forces that are whole epochs, unmeasurable eons older than ourselves. The cycle is approaching its end. But will this rebirth be partial and crippled?

The fundamental rule of persistence—the rule of balance, present in the beliefs of all primitive cultures—has collapsed. Mankind is divided into those who hold the sword and those who bow their necks. What will bring catharsis? Will the new era be like the previous one? Will we keep repeating the same mistake, if we perish devoid of consciousness, devoid of faith? Nature is defending itself. It is defending its perfect balance. To survive, the spirits of the East and the West must meet again. To triumph, the two divided worlds, the two different cultures, must unite; the chasm created over thousands of years, filled with arrogance, blindness, silence, the lust for power and conquest, must close.

The guide who appears, the voice through which the spirits speak, the last piece of the puzzle and the necessary part of fulfilling the ritual… a strong soul, which also needs a guide in the darkness where it wanders. They must find each other in the time of dreaming—beyond the law of their own cultures.

This extraordinary vision is portrayed in The Last Wave, one of the first films by Peter Weir. An attempt to find the way to reunite the primal with the secondary acquisitions of civilization. An attempt to find a single archetype of humanity and an answer to the question of where the strength of mankind lies, and how it can defend itself. This strength is its unity—its shared origin, the source from which we all came. The guide directed by the spirits will therefore be the white man. A lawyer who unexpectedly receives a dual mission. A mission belonging to reality, to the physical world, in which he is simply a lawyer, burdened with family, tradition, and memories, and a second mission, belonging to the time of dreaming, in which he is a messenger, a priest, a prophet.

A group of Aboriginals is accused of causing the death of a companion during a drunken brawl. The dry reality of the metropolis of Sydney, where there are no tribal communities, no magic, and no ancient gods, but only poverty, pain, and contempt. And he, who takes on their defense against the law and social rules, while at the same time seeks their help to understand what challenge lies before him—he senses that it exists, but he cannot grasp its meaning, as both his civilization and his religion fail him, as they do not have all the answers, even though that is how he was taught to think.

They meet halfway, for only by shaking hands can they fulfill the cycle to the end. They must overcome much, break through fear, prejudice, the common human fear of death, betray the laws to which they have grown accustomed, which each one considers sacred for themselves. The fear of physical annihilation is a natural instinct of man, who cherishes and protects what he knows best, what is closest to him. The time of dreaming preserves ideas freed from all limitations, but accepting this—and taking on one’s role—requires great faith and strength. Still, the struggle to ensure that what will emerge in the new era, after the end of everything, has a pure, beautiful form, free from all the burdens of conflict and war accumulated over the years, is worth the highest price.

Man is obligated to respect the forces that created him, but too easily and too carelessly he believed he could master them, and if not master them—forget about them. He felt like an absolute ruler, the lord of the Earth, disregarding the powers before which his ancestors trembled. In doing so, he lost much—he lost the strength that came from unity and understanding.

When black rain falls from the sky, when two suns shine side by side, and humanity is struck by plagues and catastrophes, the cycle will come to an end. And it will be up to mankind to decide whether it survives, hidden in the time of dreaming, or whether it will be carried away by the current and destroyed by the final wave. Nature will be eternal. And humanity? Can it still believe? Can it still protect itself?