Songlines, also called Dreaming tracks by Indigenous Australians, are an ancient cultural concept and motif perpetuated through oral lore and singing and other storytelling modalities such as dance and painting. Songlines are an intricate series of song cycles that identify landmarks and subtle tracking mechanisms for navigation. Each songline has a particular direction or vector, and walking the wrong way along a songline may be sacrilegious act, as at, for example, climbing up Uluru when the correct direction is down. For the Aborigine all land is sacred and alive. Their ancestors gave life in singing, gave them life through song, and dwell in the land still[citation needed]. The songs must be continually sung to keep the land "alive". In singing they preserve the land/story/dreaming of their ancestors, and recreate it in their oneness of past, present and future.
In Indigenous Australian culture
Australia's indigenous peoples conceive of all things beginning with the Dreaming or (in some Indigenous languages) Altjeringa (also called the Dreamtime), a 'once upon a time' time out of time where archetypal ancestral totemic spirit-beings formed the World. These shapeshifting spirits embodied forms of animals, plants, people, natural phenomena and/or inanimate objects and their existence is revealed by their formative journeying and the signs they deposited through the landscape. Their dreaming and journeying trails are the songlines (or "Yiri" in the Walpiri language).
The signs of the Spirit Beings may be of spiritual essence, physical remains such as petrosomatoglyphs of body impressions or footprints, amongst natural and elemental simulacrae. To cite an example, the Yarralin people of the Victoria River Valley venerate the spirit Walujapi as the Dreaming Spirit of the black-headed python. Walujapi carved a snakelike track along a cliff-face and deposited an impression of her buttocks when she sat establishing camp. Both these dreaming signs are currently discernible.
Another example is that the Rainbow Serpent followed a path across Northern Australia, creating rivers and mountains as she went, and stopping at especially sacred places such as Ubirr. A song, created by her, is still sung by Indigenous Australians, and describes her journey, and the features along it. These songs may also be used for navigation, as they describe where, for example, waterholes may be found in the desert.
Another example is the Native Cat Dreaming Spirits who are said to have commenced their journey at the sea and to have moved north into the Simpson Desert, traversing as they did so the lands of the Aranda, Kaititja, Ngalia, Kukatja, Unmatjera and Ilpara. Each peoples sing the part of the Native Cat Dreaming relating to the songlines for which they are bound in a territorial relationship of reciprocity.
The songs in a songline often evoke how the features of the land were created and named during the Dreaming. The Dreaming Spirits, as they travelled across the Earth, created and named trees, rocks, waterholes, animals and other natural phenomena. Molyneaux & Vitebsky (2000, p. 30) augment further: the Dreaming Spirits "also deposited the spirits of unborn children and determined the forms of human society," thereby establishing tribal law and totemic paradigms.
By singing the songs in the appropriate sequence, indigenous peoples could navigate vast distances (often travelling through the deserts of Australia's interior). The continent of Australia is a system of songlines, some of which are of a few kilometres, whilst others traverse hundreds of kilometres through disparate terrain and lands of many different indigenous peoples — peoples who may speak markedly different languages and champion significantly different cultural traditions.
An interesting feature of the paths is that, as they span the lands of several different language groups, different parts of the song are said to be in those different languages. Thus the whole song can only be fully understood by a person speaking all the relevant languages.
In the Sydney region, because of the soft Sydney sandstone, valleys often end in a canyon or cliff, and so travelling along the ridge lines was much easier than travelling in the valleys. Thus the songlines tend to follow the ridge lines, and this is also where much the sacred art, such as the Sydney Rock Engravings, are located. In contrast, in many other parts of Australia, the songlines tend to follow valleys, where water may be more easily found.
To indigenous peoples, songlines also confer a title and deed to the holder or the keeper of the particular song (or Dreaming) and entails an inherent obligation and reciprocity with the land.
In his 1987 book, The Songlines British novelist and travel writer, Bruce Chatwin describes the songlines as:
- "...the labyrinth of invisible pathways which meander all over Australia and are known to Europeans as 'Dreaming-tracks' or 'Songlines'; to the Aboriginals as the 'Footprints of the Ancestors' or the 'Way of the Law'.
- Aboriginal Creation myths tell of the legendary totemic being who wandered over the continent in the Dreamtime, singing out the name of everything that crossed their path- birds, animals, plants, rocks, waterholes- and so singing the world into existence."''
Songlines have been linked to aboriginal art sites in the Wollemi National Park in New South Wales[1].
See also
Notes
References
- Chatwin, Bruce (1987), The Songlines, published by Jonathan Cape, and Vintage, 1998. ISBN 0 09 976991 3
- Lawlor, Robert (1991). Voices Of The First Day: Awakening in the Aboriginal dreamtime. Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions International, Ltd. ISBN 0-89281-355-5
- Mathrani, Vandana (2002). Epic Journeys: The Great Migrations. Source: http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro00/web1/MathraniVand.html (accessed: Thursday, March 15, 2007)
- Molyneaux, Brian Leigh & Piers Vitebsky (2000). Sacred Earth, Sacred Stones: Spiritual Sites And Landscapes, Ancient Alignments, Earth Energy. London, England: Duncan Baird Publishers. ISBN 1-903296-07-2.
- Popp, T. (1997) Footprints on Rock, Sydney: Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council. ISBN 0 7313 1002 0
- Tacon, Paul (2005), Chains of Connection, Griffith REVIEW, Edition 9. [1] ISSN 1448-2924
- Watson, Helen (1989), Singing the Land, Signing the Land. Deakin University Press, Geelong Victoria 3217, 1989. [2] ISBN 0-7300-0696-4
