"She is backstage at the Sydney Opera House. She is going to perform. A young woman, a photographer, takes her picture. She wears a cloak made from possum pelts stitched together, each individual square adorned with images that contain countless sacred stories.

She is a figment of Sarah Rhodes’s imagination, an apparition that visited her in a dream. The possum skin cloak, however, is real — a spiritual garment worn by Aborigines in southeastern Australia, made known to Ms. Rhodes when she was promoting the collections of Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum.

So it’s fitting that Ms. Rhodes, 38, would be inspired by a dream to photograph these cloaks and the tribal elders who wore them.

“The acquisition of knowledge by way of dreams is a phenomenon that is well known and widely accepted in Aboriginal cultures across Australia,” wrote Vicki Couzens on Culture Victoria, an online arts and heritage project. Ms. Couzens is an Aboriginal artist and activist whose father, Ivan Couzens, appears in Slide 5."

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Lens: Cloaking the Aboriginal Past (The New York Times 6/5)