One of the most important concepts connected to Indigenous Australian mythmaking and storytelling is that of the Dreamtime. "Dreamtime" refers to the Indigenous mythic past, the time of the ancestors when the world was newly made and animals and birds lived and talked like people. It also refers to aspects of current Indigenous religious practices and beliefs. As anthropologist Diane James reports, for Indigenous peoples, the Dreamtime does not exist as something separate in history from their world today. In fact, for them it never really ended, and thus past and present exist together in a kind of unbroken continuum.