Songlines

For Aboriginal Australian peoples, a songline — or dreaming track — is a route across the land laid down by ancestral beings in the Dreaming, the founding creative era. The path of each being, and everything they made and named along the way, is held in a sequence of song and joined to story, dance and painting. Sung in order, a songline recounts the journey — and because the verses follow the land, the song is also a map.

These tracks can run for hundreds or thousands of kilometres, crossing the territories and languages of many groups, each responsible for its own stretch. A songline carries far more than navigation: it encodes where water and food may be found, the boundaries and relationships of Country, kinship and ceremonial law — a single integrated body of knowledge that lets people move and live across vast, harsh distances.

Much of this knowledge is sacred and restricted: particular songs, sites and meanings belong to specific people, may be men's or women's business, and are not freely shared. What can be said in a place like this is only the general shape of the tradition; the substance rightly remains with the custodians whose ancestors sang it, and who hold it still. It stands as perhaps the deepest example there is of knowledge kept wholly outside of writing.