Songlines, dreaming tracks and Aboriginal mapping

The idea of ‘Ley lines” in Britain was promoted after the First World War by an amateur archaeologist, the English antiquarian Alfred Watkins, most notably in his book The Old Straight Track.

He thought they were the legacy of pre-Roman inhabitants of Britain who worked out, quite sensibly – during a time when the English landscape was dense with forest – that the shortest distance between two points was a straight line and, being tougher than modern Britons, would tramp bravely through rivers and up hills to get to their destinations.

Tracks were set out visually – by lighting beacons on high points, for example – and then lining up markers and key points across the intervening land, including mounds and moats, stone circles and more. Intersections acquired local significance, becoming meeting places and markets, then later burial mounds and temples. Recent evidence confirms that these significant places later became churches and even cities.

The Irish have their fairy paths, now mainly tourist attractions dotted with picnic sites, and make believe grottoes, but many Chinese people still believe in “dragon lines” and feng shui. The Incas used “spirit-lines” or ceques with the Inca temple of the sun in Cuzco as their hub, marking the routes with wak’as, stone monuments that represent something revered.

For the Aboriginal people of Australia, songlines, also called “dreaming tracks”, are paths across land and sky, which mark the routes followed by localised “creator beings”. The paths are recorded in traditional songs, stories, dance and painting; by singing these songs in sequences, indigenous people can navigate the deserts of Australia’s interior.

One of the most common forms of representation in Australian Aboriginal culture is the map. Bark paintings are often maps, as are sand sculptures, body painting, and rock art. Spear throwers and log coffins may be decorated with maps. Message sticks and Toas (waymarkers) may incorporate geographical information.

Songlines

For many thousands of years, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have navigated their way across the lands and seas of Australia using paths called by some, ‘songlines’ or ‘dreaming tracks’ but which have their own names in Indigenous languages.

A song series (or ‘song line) is based around the creator beings and their formation of the lands and waters during the sacred creative period when ancestral beings shaped the world (‘the dreaming’). The religious and philosophical origin narratives maintained by many groups explain the creation of people, the landmarks, rock formations, watering holes, rivers, trees, sky and seas.

Symbols were also used to map the locations or directions of certain places, for example waterholes, seasonal food sources (plant and animal), or ceremonial sites.

Song series may convey oral maps of country at different scales to cover different regions. Earth, sky and water song series provided, in some cases, memory aides to assist people to travel often vast distances. They highlight the connections that Aboriginal people have with the earth, water, and seas.

Song series are a precious but endangered legacy of traditional Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander life and deserve to be preserved as one of the cultural treasures of the world’s oldest living cultures.

Navigation for trade

Trade was practised between neighbouring language groups as well as over vast distances between language groups of different environmental region. Stones, ochres, tools, ceremonial items and other resources that were not normally available within one area could be obtained through trade with another area.

Trade was not only a method of sharing resources but also a form of social control and law. Trade required people from different areas and different cultures to respect each other’s rights, boundaries and cultural differences. Trade also enabled members from different language to share aspects of the sacred narratives and ceremonies that explain the origins of people and the natural and spiritual world.

Specific cultural knowledge and practices were shared and strengthened during meetings and ceremonial gatherings. Great respect and social bonding were developed through an understanding of cultural differences and religious traditions.

As a general rule, where rock paintings or engravings are identified with mythic beings, they are the beings peculiar to the area – and often the very site-where the rock art itself is situated. Images of this kind may be described as self-referential, illustrating a site-specific being and events that occurred at the mythological site itself.

Sometimes there are designs indicating routes to related sites in the same locality. Ancient images of this type are frequently regarded as the work of the ancestral beings themselves rather than as those of humans.

Ritual artifacts

Secret-sacred artifacts bearing references to topographically focused mythology also include ceremonial paraphernalia frequently fixed to the bodies of ritual performers or carried by them – the boundary between ritual apparel and sculpture is thus often blurred.

Such constructions, usually consisting of a wooden base or frame to which hair string, twine, feathers, molded wax or gypsum, and a wide variety of other objects may be attached, are among the most spectacular of Aboriginal religious artifacts.

In Central Australia the most notable of these are the waninga (or wanigi) string crosses and decorated tnatantja (or nurtunja) poles, objects that are of astonishing beauty and variety but are largely kept from public view for reasons of religious secrecy.

Indigenous Mapping

Classical Aboriginal topographic representations are essentially religious in content. They depict places and geographical features that have been selected and are shown together based on their occurrence in sacred myths. These myths are a central element in the body of Aboriginal tradition that is founded in the concept of the Dreaming.

The people who make these topographic representations do not do so with cool detachment. In Aboriginal terms, all landscape is someone’s home. “Land,” “country,” “camp,” and “home” are encompassed by a single term in Aboriginal languages. The places represented in the works are usually the loci of intense religious, political, familial, and personal emotions.

Many of the myths are centrally concerned with spiritual identification between a set of sites and their people, thus encapsulating and asserting the customary-legal interests of particular human groups in particular areas of land. Customary rights to reproduce sacred topographical designs are frequently built on landownership rights and may be jealously guarded.

At a certain crude level it is possible to say that those who own the sacred designs (and songs and dances) own the relevant land. Mythic-topographic designs may also symbolize relationships of alliance or disjunction between distinct land-based groups, especially in the case of far-travelling myths.

Nevertheless, the myths and their more or less conventional picturings in both visual and performance modes do lead a life of their own to some extent, not always quite matching current land tenure or the current state of alliance politics.

Dreaming Tracks

The paths along which Dreamings (ancestral beings) travelled are commonly known as Dreaming tracks, some passing through the countries of dozens of groups. Over much of Australia, particularly the inland regions, Dreamings typically fall into one of four categories, depending on their pattern of travel.

There are stationary Dreamings that reside at one place and move about only at or near that site, while estate-specific Dreamings that travel about from site to site within the local estate of a single low-level land-holding group or clan.

There are also regional travellers that pass through several adjacent estates in a certain district but begin and end within the social and ritual ken of their owning members; and continental travellers that pass through dozens of estates and journey for hundreds or thousands of kilometers, linking landowners who, at least until recent times and the advent of modern communications, did not know each other.

For the traditionally minded, paintings, engravings, and sculptures themselves may belong on a continuum of manifestations of the Dreaming, together with those who made them, the natural entities projected in the designs, and the topographic features represented.

Landscape features themselves are the marks of the Dreamings, elements of a larger meaning system. Over much of Australia, Dreaming sites are connected not only in myth but by sequences of verses in long song series. These songs are typically those performed in religious ceremonies. The landscape is thus crisscrossed with what have been called songlines.

Much of the Australian continent is, or used to be, overlain by such pathways or Dreaming tracks. Although not all such lines have songs associated with them, many do.

Paintings and sculptures that depict sites along these mythological tracks, including those that are also songlines, are thus not so much “topographic representations” of whole areas as selective depictions of trackways across them. A map of Dreaming tracks constructed by an ethnologist will normally show a matrix of natural features on which Dreaming sites and their linkages are superimposed.

Aboriginal images dealing with the same tracks and songlines tend mainly to show only the linked sites, and to arrange them into a basically symmetrical pattern.

There are regions of Australia where the mythological travels of Dreaming beings play a far less structurally important role in land tenure than they do, most notably, in inland and north-central Australia. In Cape York Peninsula, although such travels are recounted in narratives, songs, and performances, the cultural emphasis is not so much on these connections between sites as on the sites themselves.