Imagine a map that is not read with the eyes but sung. A map in which each verse corresponds to a spring, a hill, a tree, and in which the order of the verses is the order of the places along the way. This is what English calls a songline, and what many Aboriginal Australian communities also call a Dreaming track, the path of an ancestral being.
The path of the ancestors
In Aboriginal traditions the ancestral beings of the Dreaming did not stay still: they travelled. Each of their journeys created features of the landscape and left a story behind. The song that tells of that journey follows the route faithfully, stop by stop. Whoever knows the song therefore knows the way, the water points, the shelters, the dangers.
A songline can be short and stay within the country of a single group, or it can cross hundreds of kilometres and the lands of different peoples speaking different languages. In that case each group holds its own section of the song, in its own language, and the line as a whole can only be put back together through cooperation between communities.
How a sung map works
Songlines combine several layers of information:
- geographical: the sequence of places, distances, the location of resources;
- ecological: which plants and animals are found in an area and in which season;
- social: which groups are responsible for a section and what kinship ties bind them;
- ceremonial: which ceremonies must be performed at a place, by whom and with which restrictions.
The song is often accompanied by dances, body painting and designs drawn on the ground. Together they form an extremely effective memory system, one that does not depend on writing and that ties information to the body and to movement.
The Seven Sisters: a songline in the sky
One of the best-known songlines is that of the Seven Sisters, called Kungkarangkalpa by the Anangu of the central desert. It tells of a group of sisters fleeing across the continent, pursued by a man who desires them and changes shape to deceive them. Along the way the sisters leave traces in the landscape, until they rise into the sky, where they become the stars we call the Pleiades.
The story is shared, in different versions, by many peoples of the western and central deserts. Some groups have told it publicly through paintings, dances and a major exhibition organised by the National Museum of Australia, choosing carefully what to make visible and what to keep restricted.
Exchange and encounter
Songlines were not only for finding one's way. Along these routes travelled objects, raw materials and ideas: ochre, stone for tools, shells, plants. At meeting points between groups, joint ceremonies were held, marriages were arranged and disputes were settled. The song, passing from language to language, was a kind of shared treaty setting out mutual rights and duties.
The book that made them famous
In Europe the word became popular thanks to The Songlines by the English writer Bruce Chatwin, published in 1987. The book deserves credit for bringing the idea to a wide audience, but it blends observation, literature and personal reflection. Many scholars and many Aboriginal communities have pointed out that it offers a romantic and partial picture. Anyone who truly wants to understand songlines should turn above all to the voices of their custodians and to ethnographic work carried out with their consent.
Knowledge that asks permission
As with the Dreaming in general, songlines are not entirely public. Some sections, songs and places are restricted to people who have undergone a specific initiation, or only to men or only to women. Hearing a songline, when a community chooses to share it, is a privilege, not a right.
An echo in the Western tradition
Students of Renaissance arts of memory will notice a suggestive likeness to "memory palaces", in which each concept was placed in an imaginary location to be walked through in the mind. Songlines do something similar, but with real places, walked and sung for generations. At Studio Esoterico Cornelio this analogy matters not as a way of merging the two traditions, but as a reminder of how deeply human the bond between place and memory is.
In short
- A songline is an ancestral route narrated by a song that follows the sequence of places.
- It carries geographical, ecological, social and ceremonial information.
- It can cross the lands of many peoples, each the custodian of its own section.
- The Seven Sisters songline links the desert to the Pleiades.
- Many sections are restricted, and knowledge of them is received only with the custodians' permission.
