Francis Gillen was the postmaster at Alice Springs and a sub-protector of Aborigines. Working with Arrernte speakers in the 1890s he needed an English phrase for a word he kept meeting — Ülchurringa, which has reached us variously as alcheringa, altyerrenge, altjeringa — and what he wrote was dream times.

Walter Baldwin Spencer, a biologist, carried the phrase into print with the Horn Expedition report of 1896 and into the standard ethnography three years after that. It has been the English word ever since, and it is the English word still.

The Arrernte root is not sleep. It sits nearer eternal, or uncreated — a thing not made and not beginning. What the word names is a system of religious belief, and the law that comes with it, and the ground both are held in.

serves to erase the complexities of the original concepts by emphasising their putatively magical, fantastic and illusory attributes, when they are understood by their diverse Aboriginal adherents to be reality, religion, and the Law.

Christine Judith Nicholls, on the English terms, 2014

So a word meaning the real was put into English as the unreal, by the two men writing the account, and the account travelled further and faster than the thing it was an account of. A hundred and thirty years on, an English speaker meeting the word hears sleep.

The referent did not drift. It was inverted in translation, on the way out, by the people holding the pen.