Songlines

Songlines map the creation of the Australian continent as form emerged from formlessness through song. Peoples of the Western Desert have performed these songs since their feet first followed the tracks of their Tjukurpa creation ancestors across the country. Keepers of the songs today recognise that their grandchildren live in a digital world in which multimedia technology can be used as an interactive memory bank for passing on their performance tradition. In 2013 Elders of the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara peoples performed of the ancient Kungkarangkalpa Inma in Canberra at the National Museum of Australia.

Like the travel memoirs of writers who have wandered the Songlines of the Australian desert under the guidance of indigenous custodians, Aboriginal desert art offers a window into the lyrical and sacred world of the Dreaming. The paintings of the EarthSong exhibition embody excerpts from the song-myth cycles of the Western Desert; using ceremonial iconography to portray the actions of Ancestral Beings at specific sites, they form maps of terrain and title deeds to country. An exploration of several of the exhibition's paintings affords a sense of the beauty, drama and complexity of the song-myth cycles that underpin and connect all of the paintings in the collection. [Update 2021: The EarthSong exhibition handout (ref. 43) is no longer available through ACU but is archived at https://www.academia.edu/29691425/Aboriginal_Art_-_ACU_-_EarthSong_-_Gallery_handout.]

While Frederick Turner’s envisioning of the frontier remains pervasive in representations of Australian postcolonial geographies and constructions of national identity, recent anthropological evidence suggests more nuanced ‘lifeworlds’ may better approximate the lived experience of ‘frontier’ towns such as Alice Springs, in Central Australia.
This paper reimagines Baudelaire’s flâneur to examine two walking narratives from the region. The analysis reveals at least two levels of produced space prevailing in Alice Springs, with many other imagined spaces imbricated in a more complex political geography than Turner’s frontier might explain.  The paper aims to alert writers and journalists to recent shifts in anthropology, leading hopefully to more nuanced representations of Australian postcolonial geographies.
The first text is a Central Australian Aboriginal Dreaming narrative called A Man from the Dreamtime, a traditional Kaytetye story. Kaytetye elder Tommy Kngwarraye Thompson told the story to anthropologist Myfany Turpin as part of a collection published as Growing Up Kaytetye (2003). The second is one (walking) chapter from a recent narrative of political geography and memoir by Eleanor Hogan entitled Alice Springs (2012).

This article presents an analysis of an Aboriginal songline in south-eastern Australia that has not been previously recorded. As part of a project examining the astronomy and songline connections of the Saltwater Aboriginal peoples of the New South Wales coast, the Black Duck Songline was identified that may have links to the Pleiades star cluster. The Pleiades, known by many peoples as the Seven Sisters, is one of the most important elements of Aboriginal cosmologies across Australia, and features in songlines and oral traditions, as well as being a resource calendar identifier. Aboriginal songlines are a unique development of Aboriginal culture that celebrate the travels of the Creator Ancestors as they shaped the very landscape. The identification of the Black Duck Songline and its possible connection to the Pleiades is an example of the potential reawakening of other long-distance songlines in Australia and their connection to the cosmology of their communities.

When traditional cultures practice rituals of regeneration, attention is typically paid to united concerns of the inner life and care for nature. In an age of increasing climate change crisis, members of urban societies must recompose rituals of renewal with a similarly holistic cosmology in mind. The ‘modern soul’ is more than ever in need of direct relation with the rest of nature as well as inner psychic harmony. But while exercising caution not to ‘co-opt’ Aboriginal songlines such as the kujika of Yanyuwa tribe of north eastern Arnhem Land, we can recognise great potential in adopting a similar ontopoetic structure in a new way. Executed with the appropriate balance of cultural sensitivity and openness to ‘the song of the land,’ new kinds of songlines (or more appropriately ‘country lines’) can combine uniquely modern concerns such as technology and excessive pollution with traditional conceptions of a holistic world wherein nature and psyche are known as a complex and diverse unity. When all creatures and landforms ‘sing’ in one chorus of interrelated life – wherein conflict is included and managed ‘in line’ with this higher synthesis of complexity – a resilient new cosmology may be composed.

This chapter explores the concepts of time and history in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara peoples' oral tradition of story and song of Tjukurpa, the Dreaming law. Anangu holistic ontology of continuous cyclical time is compared to the western linear division of time into prehistory, history, present and future.

Invitation to the art exhibition accompanying Grounding the Sacred through Literature and the Arts, a conference celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Australian Catholic University, 23 – 26 Jul, 2015, Sydney.

EarthSong was a public exhibition (23 Jul – 15 Aug, 2015) at the McGlade Gallery of my collection of Aboriginal art from the Western Desert region of Australia.

Gallery brochure/guide for the EarthSong exhibition. This show accompanied Grounding the Sacred through Literature and the Arts, a conference celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Australian Catholic University, 23 – 26 Jul, 2015, Sydney.

EarthSong was a public exhibition (23 Jul – 15 Aug) at the McGlade Gallery of my collection of Aboriginal art from the Western Desert region of Australia.

If utopia has often been criticized as an unrealistic and unsustainable fantasy, then the most prominent example of this imaginary today must be the vision provided by the endless growth and profit model of global capital. This utopian dreaming of perpetual abundance links technological progress with faith in human culture’s ability to master the rest of nature. Fredric Jameson followed Ernst Bloch’s recognition of this deep yearning for a land of milk and honey and I likewise return to the Principle of Hope, this time to trace the way Bloch treats light as a mythic symbol of abundance. Citing the famous NASA photomontage of the planet at night, this article shows how modern urban life relies on the unsustainable combustion of fossil fuels in an effort to banish the night from earthly life. It also cites a selection of advertisements that directly link light with magical yet ubiquitous powers of overcoming, and which ignore or conceal the dire ecological consequences of this Promethean dreaming. The article concludes with reference to the comparatively realistic visions of critical ecotopias and ecodystopias that remind us of our collective hopes for a better future in terms both social and ecological.

A brief essay on culture and synaesthesia, with special focus on Bruce Chatwin's novel The Songlines (1987).

Breve ensayo divulgativo sobre cultura y sinestesia, con especial énfasis en la novela Los trazos de la canción, de Bruce Chatwin.

A multimedia project by Nia Emmanouil, Richard Hunter, Frans Hoogland and Jacqui Wright for ABC OPEN: https://open.abc.net.au/explore/191936 Each year the Goolarabooloo Indigenous Community guides people on a walk along the Lurujarri Dreaming Trail, an ancestral pathway that follows the Northern Tradition Song Cycle from Broome to Yellow River. Walking this trail offers the time and space to slow down and listen to place in new or different ways, to feel Country. Goolarabooloo storyteller, Richard Hunter, and Trail organiser, Frans Hoogland, share their perspectives on what Country is and how, through our liyan, we can all feel Country, including the räi (spirit entities) that enliven the Country with which we walk.

A multimedia project by Nia Emmanouil, Richard Hunter, Frans Hoogland and Jacqui Wright for ABC OPEN: https://open.abc.net.au/explore/191936

Each year the Goolarabooloo Indigenous Community guides people on a walk along the Lurujarri Dreaming Trail, an ancestral pathway that follows the Northern Tradition Song Cycle from Broome to Yellow River.

Walking this trail offers the time and space to slow down and listen to place in new or different ways, to feel Country.

Goolarabooloo storyteller, Richard Hunter, and Trail organiser, Frans Hoogland, share their perspectives on what Country is and how, through our liyan, we can all feel Country, including the räi (spirit entities) that enliven the Country with which we walk.