The single label used here covers the traditions of hundreds of distinct peoples across a continent, speaking more than 250 languages before 1788 and around 120 today. They are not dialects of one religion. Ancestral narratives, ceremonies, songs, designs, kinship systems and law differ between neighbouring groups, and rights in them are held by particular people, not shared in common. There is no Aboriginal word for the whole, because the whole is a category created by outsiders needing a heading.
What can be said across groups is limited but real. Religious authority is tied to country: a specific, bounded stretch of land and water with which a group of people stands in a relationship of descent and responsibility. Sites within it are where ancestral beings acted, and those actions are recorded in song, design and ceremony held by the people responsible for that site. Knowledge is therefore located rather than universal, and someone from elsewhere has no standing to speak for it.
Kinship organises the rest. Most systems divide people into named categories that determine who may marry whom, who is responsible for whose ceremony, and who speaks for which country. Totemic relationships link people to species, features and ancestral beings, carrying obligations to look after them.
Songlines, sometimes called dreaming tracks, follow the routes ancestral beings travelled, crossing many groups' countries and many language boundaries. Each group holds the section passing through its own country and performs it with the neighbours who hold the adjoining sections, which makes long ceremonies collaborative undertakings between peoples rather than the property of one.
These are living traditions. Writing about them in the past tense, as much older literature does, is both inaccurate and a habit worth breaking.