THE DREAMING TRACKS
My focus of interest has for many years
been the network of Aboriginal migratory trails, known colloquially as the
Songlines, that cover the entire continent, how these routes were appropriated
post-invasion to establish the coloniser’s own society,
and how reclaiming them and officially re-instating them under Indigenous
management has the potential to create an economic base for all homeland
communities that will physically and spiritually re-unite people and their
tribal territories.
The Dreaming Tracks form the
overarching structure of all of Australia’s Indigenous societies; they are the
connectivity that unites hearts and minds.
My
interest in this issue began after a moment of revelation in 1996 when, whilst
poring over a topographical map of the area where I’d recently acquired some land,
a Songline jumped out at me. Centering on a highly venerated spring,
I tracked a route from the north directly to the Bunya Mountains following
permanent waterholes that Aboriginal people could have walked along on their
three-yearly migration to the Great Bunya Festival.
Songlines are essentially the
journeying trails made by the Ancestral Spirit Beings at the time of creation;
they formed the landscape as they passed by and left behind their spiritual
essence at certain significant places, imbuing the land with their numinous
presence. Helen Nunggalurr explains the creation
journeys of the Ancestral Spirit Beings:
First, all the things in our environment were
created by spirit beings which we call Wangarr.
They created the different tribes and their languages. During their creation journeys they created
animals, plants, waterholes, mountains, reefs, billabongs and so on. Today we can see their signs. These are the
features in our landscape. This is why these places are our sacred areas which
we must respect and care for.
Lyall Watson describes a
kind of ‘spiritual engineering’ that takes place when those who live close to
the earth can feel ‘the rhythm of its breath’, a metaphysical definition I feel
aptly applies to Aboriginal relationships with their Songlines.
The Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation also provide a comprehensive
understanding of the importance of the Songlines to Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander societies.
Every continent on Earth where human
civilizations have arisen, evolved migratory trails that people walked for
thousands of years in their pilgrimages to sacred places, on seasonal
migrations in the pursuit of food, or for the trading and exchange of goods and
knowledge. In most countries, the modern world has overlaid the tracks with
tarmac roads, buildings and fields and erased even the memory of the ancestor’s
pathways, but traces remain, and many pilgrimages along ancient pathways are still
extant. One of the world’s most famous migratory
routes, now a major tourist attraction, is the Silk Road, a 2000 year old
trading trail linking Asia and Europe.
Many other world cultures recognise analogous ‘earth paths’ across their
lands, some believing them to be telluric currents of magnetic energy known as
ley-lines in Europe, snake lines in India and dragon lines in
China, which circulate the ‘blood of the gods’ through the veins of the
Earth. Alanna Moore is one of many
geomancers who believe they can detect - or dowse - these flows of energy. Moore elucidates:
Songlines are mythic cycles. They tell
stories which articulate together across vast distances, linking neighbouring
tribes into a cohesive pattern. The Songline/Dreaming Tracks are associated
with, or follow, the ancient pathways that link the sacred sites together.
Sites where the great Totemic Ancestors created the landscape and then came to
rest …. the song cycles provide people with a mind map of their country.
Indigenous peoples everywhere have
traditionally sensed and interpreted vibrations emanating from the earth and
sea; Polynesians could ‘read’ wave patterns through the hulls of their boats;
according
to Wikipedia, ‘a number of anthropologists and scientists
have found that the Aborigines possess an acute sensitivity to magnetic and
vital force flows emanating from the earth.’ Early anthropologists were amazed by
Aborigines who walked through immense desert expanses, unerringly finding their
way to tiny water holes on distant mission settlements; they seem to move
through the countryside instinctively, in a manner comparable to what we now
understand about bird and animal migration. In ‘Dark
Sparklers’, Bill Yiumduma Harney explains the Songlines through Aboriginal
cosmology, adding a wealth of additional knowledge to the public domain.
It has been an historic ‘blink of an
eye’ since Aborigines regularly used their trails (as recently as 40 years ago
in some places) and maintained them with conservation methods such as firestick
burning to keep them open and provide fresh grass for herbivores. Even though
most have now been overlaid or have overgrown, their positions are still known
to many elders who retain the knowledge of the significant places along them
and the skills to maintain them. According to Wakka Wakka man Robert Bond, when the pioneers began occupying
the land, Aboriginal people helped them navigate their stock across the country
by showing them the migration paths, and that much of the stock route system
actually follows the routes of ancient trails.
It appears that most of the explorers were also aided in this way. It makes
sense to me that the pioneering stockmen would use already open and well
established routes to move their cattle from water source to water source –
later they sank bores along the trails.
Affirmation of this appropriation comes from Dreaming
Tracks and Trading Paths - a study of Aboriginal trading routes through
Queensland:
Aboriginal song lines and trade routes became the foundation for stock
routes, coach ways and bitumen highways because successful European exploration
used the expediency of Aboriginal guides who travelled along the routes already
familiar to them. These routes are documented in instruments of land management
such as churingas, toas or shields, and in the mnemotic memory of songs and
stories.
Moggridge
maintains that European settlers owed their subsequent knowledge of groundwater
to local tribes and trackers, and even much of Australia's modern road system
is based on water sources identified by the original inhabitants. "A lot of the old roads in New South
Wales are based on Aboriginal walking tracks ... and their water supply would
have been along the way.” As far as I am aware, there has never been
official recognition of this fact by any Australian government.
In recent years however, it appears
that the Songlines, along with the Wandjina and Rainbow Serpent, are
re-emerging from the landscape, into people’s consciousness. A number of
eco/cultural tourism ventures have arisen centered on Aboriginal Songlines.
This trend can only grow in the future.
A recent archaeological expedition discovered a wealth of engravings and
motifs on rock overhangs that indicated a series of Dreaming Tracks that once
crossed the Wollemi National Park; for those who knew the song cycle, these
markers could be read like a map. Shaun
Hooper, a Wiradjuri man and a leader of the project, explains:
All across
Australia there's pathways that people could use to move about the country. As
long as you knew the protocol and the proper ceremonies associated with each
place you could use those pathways … We have been told for many years that the
Wollemi was a wilderness, that it was too rugged to walk through and no one
went there. But Aboriginal people went everywhere. There's nowhere Aboriginal
people haven't been …. I look at the art and I feel that the ancestors are
talking and no one's listened for a long time, and now they have got the whole
world listening.
There has been
a lot of interest and progress in digitalizing the Songlines. John Bradley, The Language Man, has
also set up a digital Songline site and believes our society has missed a
golden opportunity by ignoring them.
I believe mapping the Songines and
restoring them to their previous condition would not only reconstruct the
‘Corpus Australis’, the grid of inter-connectivity that Mowaljarlai explains
connects all people in the Wunnan system,
but would also open up limitless potential for eco/cultural tourism, not to mention
invaluable educational opportunities for young people, Indigenous and
non-Indigenous alike. Walking along
them again
would invigorate biodiversity, the energetic strength in the Land, pouring
love and respect back into it – it would protect significant sites and
help re-build the oldest extant cultures on Earth. If the Dreaming Tracks
could be mapped, as with the Kayapo’s tracks in the Amazon Basin and the
ancient walking tracks of Britain and Europe, they could be registered
federally as sacred landscape of immense cultural significance. There would be no need for
any native title claims in this process; all property owners would be
obliged to do, as with the stock routes, is allow a gate through
any fence that crossed the
pathway on their land. At the moment,
farmers have no problem allowing graziers with transient stock to cross their
land following the stock route; with a sensitive publicity campaign,
emphasizing the enormous benefits to the landholder, I am sure any opposition
can be diplomatically overcome to do the same for this country’s Indigenous
peoples. These corridors can be restored with diverse endemic tree plantings on
each side, with the trail kept open centrally – they will then be utilized by
wildlife for species to migrate from isolated remnant to remnant. My aim for the future is to tour Australia
visiting places of significance and working with elders to map them on the
Songline grid. To be able to co-ordinate an action plan, I will need to explore
each territory’s migration trails specifically. I am sure this will lead to
increased understanding on my part, of each group’s customs as relates to their
land.
In the latest edition of the Koori
Mail, there is a wonderful report on the Warumungu and Kaytetye peoples walking their Dreaming tracks
again
which can only be inspirational for all Indigenous Australians. Recognition is
also being sought for another migration corridor, The Bundian Way, and it has
been nomination for National Heritage listing for its Aboriginal and European
shared heritage values.
This new interest in the Songlines is
occurring at the same time that the stock route system, which embodies so many
of them, is in more peril than ever before.
New South Wales has sold off vast tracts of stock route, which may very
well be cleared by the new owners and incorporated into their paddocks.
Queensland has suggested a similar sell-off. The first priority in any
restoration of the Dreaming Tracks is to secure the stock-route system and
prevent State Governments selling them.
I
believe this is an eminently achievable way for Aboriginal people to reconnect with the body of ‘Bandaiyan’ to restore cultural dignity and strength,
and to resume their rightful custodianship of their homelands, peacefully and
with elegant simplicity. My hope and dream is that Aboriginal people
everywhere will once again stride out along their spirit pathways, “the lords
of creation stepping out with elastic tread and graceful bearing.”
My long-term aim is to write a thesis on
this subject, and in my research found that someone already had; this will be a
priority to study:
Australian Digital Theses Program: Aboriginal Dreaming
Tracks or Trading Paths: The Common ways. Author: Kerwin, Dale Wayne,
Griffith University 2006 “This thesis recognises the great
significance of 'walkabout' as a major trading tradition whereby the Dreaming
paths and songlines formed major ceremonial routes along which goods and
knowledge flowed. These became the trade routes that criss-crossed Australia
and transported religion and cultural values. The thesis also highlights the
valuable contribution Aboriginal people made in assisting the European
explorers, surveyors, and stockmen to open the country for colonisation, and it
explores the interface between Aboriginal possession of the Australian
continent and European colonisation and appropriation. Instead of positing a
radical disjunction between cultural competencies 'before' and 'after', the
thesis considers how European colonisation of Australia (as with other colonial
settings) appropriated Aboriginal competence in terms of the landscape: by
tapping into culinary and medicinal knowledge, water and resource knowledge,
hunting, food collecting and path-finding. As a consequence of this assistance,
Aboriginal Dreaming tracks and competence in terms of the landscape: by tapping
into culinary and medicinal knowledge, water and resource knowledge, hunting,
food collecting and path-finding. As a consequence of this assistance,
Aboriginal Dreaming tracks and trading paths also became the routes and roads
of colonisers. This dissertation seeks to reinstate Aboriginal people into the
historical landscape of Australia. From its beginnings as a footnote in
Australian history, Aboriginal society, culture, and history has moved into the
preamble, but it is now time to inscribe Aboriginal people firmly in the body
of Australian history.”
Ban Ban Springs – Mavis Hawkins plaque http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ban_Ban_Springs Ban Ban [Springs] is a sacred site and has a Dreamtime association with the Rainbow
Serpent which is
believed to have surfaced there. It spoke to the elders of the tribe telling
them the secrets of the sacred waters and how to use it. The Rainbow Serpent
also told of talks he had had with the seven sisters and of the wonders he had
seen while making the pathways for the sacred water to flow in this area. (This
legend is retold on a mural erected at the site by elders Mavis Hawkins, Dennis
and Daniel Cobbo of the Wakka Wakka tribe and their people) It is the birth
place of many elders of the Wakka Wakka people with elders of this group living
in the town of Gayndah Ban Ban Springs is unique in Indigenous
Heritage. It is sacred in men's Business and women's Business for separate and
combined reasons. Throughout time this area has been guarded by the Rainbow
Serpent
“Indigenous
Australian’s creation stories generally describe the journeys of ancestral
beings, often giant animals or people, over what began as a featureless domain.
Mountains, rivers, waterholes, animals and plant species, and other natural and
cultural resources came into being as a result of events which took place
during the Dreamtime journeys. The routes taken by the Creator Beings in the
Dreamtime journeys across land and sea, are also of continuing significance to
Aboriginal peoples. They link many sacred sites together in a web of Dreaming
tracks criss-crossing the country.
Dreaming tracks can run for hundreds even thousands of kilometers, from
desert to the coast and crossing through many ‘countries’. Stories and songs
which relate the creation events that occurred along dreaming tracks may be
shared by peoples in countries through which the tracks pass. For this reason
Dreaming tracks are sometimes known as ‘songlines’. Sacred sites and Dreaming
tracks also serve the important function of defining Aboriginal countries. Clan estates, and larger tribal or language
areas, are largely defined not so much by rigid external boundaries but by the
location and significance of sacred sites, Dreaming tracks and other special
places. The path of Dreaming tracks within or between estates help to define
their size and shape.
(Reading 26 History of Invasion of Aboriginal Nations –
Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, 1994, ‘In the beginning…’ Understanding
Country: The importance of Land and Sea in Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Societies, AGPS, Canberra, pp.3-8)
Indigenous World Views Topic 2 provides an excellent
description of the Songlines: “The
Australian continent is criss-crossed with the tracks of the Dreaming: walking, slithering, crawling, flying,
chasing, hunting, weeping, dying, giving birth.
Performing rituals, distributing the plants, making the landforms and
water, establishing things in their own places; making the relationships
between one place and another. Leaving
parts or essences of themselves, looking back in sorrow; and still traveling, changing languages,
changing songs, changing skin … Where
they traveled, where they stopped, where they lived the events of their lives,
all these places are sources and sites of Law.
These tracks and sites, and the Dreamings associated with them, make up
the sacred geography of Australia. They are visible in paintings and
engravings; they are sung in songs, depicted in body paintings and engravings; they form the basis of a major dimension of
the land tenure system for most Aboriginal people. To know the knowledge of how the human owners
of that country came into being. Except in cases of succession, the
relationship between the people and their country is understood to have existed
from time immemorial – to be part of the land itself. (Rose 1996, pp 35-36)
Remnants of the “long walk” in England where people
chanted whilst they walked to holy sites – up a mountain in Ireland – Buddha
festival walk up a sacred mountain - the
spiral walk up Glastonbury hill. (google holy trails)
The study of Ley Lines, began in Europe
in the 1970’s, when straight direct lines linked by churches and Cathedrals
were identified and there has been speculation ever since on the meaning of
these imaginary lines in the landscape. Dowsers say they can detect a magnetic
telluric flow. Bruce Cathay identified them as earth’s magnetic grid – website
“The Polynesians were master navigators … they
used the stars as fixed points of reference. They understood the significance of
stationary clouds, the presence of birds and flotsam as indications of nearby
land. But most extraordinary of all, they had learned how to read and interpret
the changing patterns created by ocean waves. A stone thrown into a pond will
set up a series of ripples. Any object, like a rock or even a mooring post,
which breaks the surface, will affect the pattern of the ripples. Pond or
Pacific Ocean, the same principal applies. Islands and atolls have the same
effect as rocks and posts. The Polynesians observed that when waves hit an
island, some are reflected back in the direction from which they have come
while others are deflected at angles round the island and continue their
passage in a modified form. The art of reading the waves was taught to
Polynesian boys with the aid of the mattang, a web of interlocking sticks which
demonstrated all the basic patterns that waves can form when they are deflected
by land. The adult navigator gauged these wave patterns entirely by his sense
of touch. He would crouch in the bow of his canoe and literally feel every
motion of the vessel.” http://www.theorderofmattang.com
"...
they would not merely look at the waves, but crouch in the hull of the bow as
close as possible to the most precious device for navigation they had
discovered, the ocean's motions, and feel reverberating in their bones, wave
patterns bouncing off island 100 miles away. Map and medium, sailor and
tool of his trade, were one."
Lawlor
(1991: p.104-105) states: A number of
anthropologists and scientists have found that the Aborigines possess an acute
sensitivity to magnetic and vital force flows emanating from the earth, which
they refer to as songlines. Perhaps the oldest geomancy tradition, songlines
are fundamental to Aboriginal initiatic knowledge and religion. Songlines are
so named because they are maps written in songs, depicting mythic events at
successive sites along a walking trail that winds through a region. Wikipedia (website)
Dan Winter has written extensively on the energetic
connections between humans and the earth, and although they do appear to be
pseudo-scientific, I am intrigued enough to research further: Magnetic
Wind of the Sun: Testing the Indigenous Dreamspell for the Symmetry of What is
Shareable by Dan Winter and Steve Tribbeck: Steve explained to me that during
aboriginal ritual, a massive collective thrust of emotional momentum, is sent
consciously into the Earth. The gathered collective almost glandular
electricity of tribal ceremony is consciously aimed and focused on an Earth
song line as a kind of conference phone call to record the tribal moment into
the Earth grid. The way a song line works at one level has been described as a
mnemonic device for recalling how to live and eat and move at the various sites
along the Earth walk. At another level however we recall how the sounds of the
song literally changed the germination time of the old blue corn seed.
Piezoelectrically the Earth rock, like seed DNA, appears to be able to better
phase lock or record human emotion, in the presence of the conscious phonon
braiding we call ‘song’ This is because the sonic pressure envelopes phonon
hologram at one level, vibrates the DNA’s microwave to symbiosis with the Earth
grid’s same microwave affinities. At another level the rocks themselves are
piezoelectric and thus phonon sensitive not just to feet dancing and drums
beating, but also to long wave coherent sound in general. The geometry of
pressure of human feeling walks in pilgrimage into Earth’s magnetic lines like
a giant library whose storage algorhythmn is symmetry among magnetic circles.
So the old ones go to old rocks to collect the feeling magnetics of old
memories similar to the way westerners use library cards with magnetic stripes.
'Dark Sparklers by Hugh Cairns and Bill
Yidumduma Harney, self-published by H.C. Cairns 2003, rev. 2004. A. P. Elkin
worked with Harney's father, resulting in a collaborative book published
in1968- 'Songs of the Songmen', W.E. Harney & A.P. Elkin. Elkin had
mentioned the great importance of the night sky to the Wardaman and others in
northern Australia and noted that shamen undergoing initiation would
"travel to the Milky Way into the Southern Cross / Dark Coal Sack area for
a 3 day initiation". Harney
invented the term 'cosmoscape' to describe the geomancy of both Earth and sky.
In Wardaman cosmology, the night sky is the home of spiritual presences who
journey along vast songlines. In this collaborative book co-author Hugh Cairns
explains the similarity of cosmoscapes across Australia. For example, the Great
Emu Spirit was first described in the literature in 1925, by Prof Baselow, who
describes its exact location (usually in the Dark Coal Sack). In perhaps
the oldest of all the world's cosmologies, the typical scenario finds a Sky
Boss, an Earth Mother and a Rainbow Spirit - who is usually represented as a
serpent and is responsible for water. Different other totemic beings inhabit
the sky, of varying significance to various tribes. Two outstanding songlines, originating from
the Leo and Pleiades constellations, traverse the Wardaman sky on their journey
to the Southern Cross, and ancient stories are enacted across time and space
each year, as different presences reveal themselves along the way. The stars,
and the dark spaces (cosmic dust nebulae clouds) with their "shadows"
of powerful spiritual presences, provide maps for Earthly navigation, as well
as dictating the annual cycles of life, of ceremony and the training of the
young in the stages of initiation. Across the songlines the Creator Dog a
Thylacine, marsupial dog now extinct, carries a Bag of Songs given him by the
great Sky Boss, in a cycle that starts in late April, the beginning of the
ceremonial year and ends in October, after which the wet season begins. This
dog is accompanied at various stages by the Lightning Children, borne of the
great trinity of beings, plus the totemic Creator Spirits (usually in animal
form) and human spirits too. Review by
Alanna Moore, Geomantica 36
Griffith University DI0347624 Mr D Kerwin Dr RJ Ganter
Title: Dreaming Tracks and
Trading Paths - a study of Aboriginal trading routes through Queensland 2003: $10,000 2004: $10,022
Summary:
Aboriginal song lines and trade routes became the foundation for stock
routes, coach ways and bitumen highways because successful European exploration
used the expediency of Aboriginal guides who travelled along the routes already
familiar to them. These routes are documented in instruments of land management
such as churingas, toas or shields, and in the mnemotic memory of songs and
stories. By reading together these two types of knowledge - of European
exploration and of Aboriginal authorship of country - popular ways of 'knowing
Aborigines' become fundamentally reinscribed and much popular knowledge about
Aboriginal societies is deeply challenged.
Moggridge - http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s1590192.htm
Aboriginal people built water tunnels.
Judy Skatssoon, ABC Science Online15 March 2006:
Moggridge says European settlers owed their subsequent knowledge of groundwater
to local tribes and trackers, and even much of Australia's modern road system
is based on water sources identified by the original inhabitants. "A lot of the old roads in New South
Wales are based on Aboriginal walking tracks ... and their water supply would
have been along the way," he says.
The Desert Knowledge CRC is also trying to link traditional knowledge
with science in terms of water management in central Australia, home to
numerous remote Indigenous communities. Current projects include looking at the
cultural values of water, a spokesperson says.
Cultural tourism: Aboriginal tourism venture opens: A new interpretation trail has been opened in
the state's north to provide an insight into Tasmanian Aboriginal cultural
heritage. The Tulampanga trail near Mole Creek is an example of the attractions
that will be developed and promoted as part of the state government's
Aboriginal Tourism Development Plan. The Community Development Minister,
Michelle O'Byrne, says the plan, although in its early stages, will help create
a better understanding of Aboriginal culture. "There's a great opportunity
for Tasmanian Aboriginal Tourism, not only in some of the sites that have great
meaning and tell great stories of the journey of the Tasmanian Aboriginal
people over thousands of years but also there is wonderful theatre, wonderful
singing, there is great dance work, a whole multitude of experience that we can
have," Ms O'Byrne said.
The Digital Songlines Project is a narrative that allows the viewer
to follow an Aboriginal songline through the landscape, encountering the
legends, lore, totemic items and practical issues of day-to-day living as a
traditional person would. http://songlines.interactiondesign.com.au
Virtual
Dreamtime Springs to Life: Their Digital
Songlines project is a narrative that allows the viewer to follow an Aboriginal
songline through the landscape, encountering the legends, lore, totemic items
and practical issues of day-to-day living as a traditional person would.
Designed primarily to help Indigenous Australians to retain their cultural
knowledge and share it with their descendants, the project also offers people
of non-indigenous background a unique window into how the continent’s first
inhabitants saw and experienced it. Early on, initial partners who formed ACID
identified the opportunity for an experience that could offer a different
approach to virtual tours on offer at museums and sites around the world. ACID
CEO Jeff Jones and Indigenous community member Brett Leavy quickly saw the need
for a different approach, more in tune with the Indigenous perception of
landscape as an unfolding story or songline, blending spirituality with
reality. The project aims to protect, preserve and promote Australian Indigenous
culture, its practices, myths and legends, expanding and re-vitalizing it
through the visualization. Hills and Leavy are using a computer game engine for
the simulation, creating an easy-to-use virtual world that individual
Indigenous communities can populate with their own landscapes, cultural
memories, legendary figures and items of significance. The first two pilot
projects feature the Carnarvon Gorge area in Queensland and the Mill Stream
area in the Western Australia Pilbara region. Other projects in Arnhem Land and
Far North Queensland are also being discussed. Their approach fuses
topographical data gathered by satellites from outer space with cultural
objects and traditional memories that may be thousands of years old into a
living story line which the viewer participates in. It contains animated
dreamtime stories and avatars – virtual representations of the
participant. “You can be a wedgetailed eagle and soar above the landscape.
You can be the hunted kangaroo or the indigenous hunter who pursues it. You can
view the landscape from the perspective and speed of an echidna. You can follow
the cycle of the seasons as you travel from one water source to another,” Brett
Leavy says. “The whole project has been carried out in very close
consultation with traditional owners. It’s designed so they can retain their
own cultural and sacred knowledge for their own community and update it
themselves - or create their own experience of landscape and tradition to share
with others.” The ACID team’s goal is to create an authentic experience of
landscape that has been validated ethnographically, and a versatile set of
tools, methodologies and protocols that allow people to create their
own. The prototype of Digital Songline is almost complete and interest
from investors and participants in the pre-production phase is strong, James
Hills says. “We hope to have the first product available commercially in one to
two years. A key goal of the project is to help improve indigenous communities
maintain their culture and identify, which will lead to improved quality of
life. Outcomes of this project will be export opportunities for the
presentation of arts, culture and heritage using the virtual Songlines toolkit.
http://songlines.interactiondesign.com.au
The Language Man - message
stick: (website) John Bradley: “Their stories were used as evidence in court
for the Yanuwa’s successful land rights claim in 1990’s – ‘…white-bellied sea
eagle gave all those stories in land claims to get the country back..’ – told
to lawyers and judge – The dictionary is important but not the most important
thing - developing tools and aids that stress the notion of relationship is
most important and the atlas is the most important tool for that. Forget About Flinders 2003 – it is
constantly being built upon – maps, stories, geographically significant
landmarks and sacred sites matched up with photographs and pictures. Singing to
country, Songlines that crisscross the land in a web of stories linking people
with animals, with the Ancestral Beings who named the country. Aboriginal man;
“The songline is like a map of how the land was created by the old people – a
thing that they have got to follow as a line,
their law, like the Bible, kept
everybody in their place - everybody had that in their mind all the time –
doesn’t mean much to the younger generation -
they never carried that on.” (Maybe you should teach them then) “It’s a sad fact that Yanuwa children, even
adults, have little knowledge of the Songlines - you sense in kids that they want to know, but
they don’t know what it is they want to know
– that’s the big challenge - how do you create devices that the young
might be interest in – I created “storyboard” - 400 kms of songlines , a series
of animated songlines via the internet – this is a radical intervention of
another kind - impressing on them that culture, law is worth something. The songlines represent a missed opportunity
for Australians - at their core, these invisible threads of creation, create a
sense of sacred, something that is
seriously misunderstood. Yanuwa language tradition is a mighty powerful thing –
maybe in future generations it will rise up and grab people again – the best I
can do is provide a core body of data they can reach to, in the richest sense
possible.”
Mowaljarlai explains the Wunan system in Yorro Yorro: First
he draws a lattice work grid over a sketch of Australia, then pretends to lift
the lattice work up, to demonstrate a three-dimensional continent, and
explains: “I want to show you how all
Aboriginal people in Australia are connected in the Wunnan system. The squares
are the areas where the communities are represented and their symbols and the
languages of the different tribes in this country from long-long ago. The lines are the way the history stories
traveled along these trade routes. They
are all inter-connected. It is the
pattern of the sharing system.” (from Yorro Yorro – get reference)
Another
explanation: “The Wunan is a set of
prescriptive and proscriptive rules of civilized behaviour … the most prized
possession of a Ngarinyin adult … there
is a strong value in the civil process of belonging … Wunan functions as
received law rather than imposed statute.
Described … as a gift, the receiver of law as knowledge has a subtle but
profound honour attached that sustains dignity and morale. (Doring in Ngarjno,
Ungudman, Banggal & Nyawarra, 2000 p.22)(Topic 6, Indigenous World Views)
Step in the right direction: A group of Aboriginal people in
the Northern Territory have literally followed their ancestors’ footsteps. Last month, about 40 people, walked along a
134 km traditional track starting at Bonney Well, south of Tennant Creek, and
ending at Barrow Creek. Taking a little over two weeks to complete, the trek
was designed by senior Warumungu and Kaytetye people as a way of transmitting
traditional knowledge to younger generations.
More than 40 years ago, the route was a main thoroughfare for Aboriginal
people who were traveling for ceremonial purposes, to visit family or go to
work on the pastoral properties Greenwood, Neutral Junction, singleton and
Hatches Creek and also to pick up food from the major centres of Wauchope and
Barrow Creek. Soakage Points. Some members of the group walked the route
regularly when they were in their 20’s. There were more than 40 soakage points
along the way where people could wash up and rest. Some family groups on the
walk included three or four generations. The walk was funded by the NT and
Australian Governments’ Healthy Country, Healthy People program, the Department
of Employment, Education and Training and the NT Natural Resources Management
program. The Central Land council
facilitated the walk by aboriginal people in Tennant Creek. Picture: A group of
mainly women and children following Male Elder and young boy – caption: “The group walking into Barrow Creek on the
final day of the walk. The walk included
different language groups with men and women, boys and girls.” Photo courtesy
of the Central Land Council. (The Koori
Mail, Wednesday July 2, 2008)
Recognition sought for ancient pathway 12.7.06: An ancient pathway, part of the remarkable trade
and cultural routes of Australia that predate the Silk Road, the Roman roads
and other great roads of world antiquity, has been nominated as National
Heritage of Australia. The Bundian Way, a corridor including the old pathways
use to walk to and fro between Twofold Bay, the Snowy Mountains and beyond, has
been nominated by the Eden Local Aboriginal Land Council for recognition as a
significant part of our National Heritage for its Aboriginal an European shared
heritage values. It runs through the wild,
much-mythologised ‘Man from Snowy River’ country, and in some parts local roads
and tracks follow its course. One pathway spur continues on to Omeo and
Gippsland or to the western plains via the Omea Gap. The Bundian Pathway passes
through Delegate and by the village of Towamba, finishing near Boydtown and
Twofold Bay. “When the European pioneers arrived on the Monaro tablelands they
found the extremely rugged mountain ranges a barrier to settlement,” says
researcher, John Blay. “It was too
difficult to get produce to market without access to the nearest harbour in
Eden. The old Aboriginal clans came to
the rescue and showed the settlers pathways that had been used for thousands of
years. These became the first
roads.” The clans also showed the pioneers
how to get to Gippsland, which was unsettled at the time, and further west to
the plains country through the Omeo Gap. ….. It is important for readers to
note that the nomination has nothing to do with native title. It is not a claim
for land or ownership. It asks for acknowledgement of some Aboriginal cultural
heritage values in the historic landscape. These are symbolized by the old
pathways which connect places of significance for all Australians, Koori and
Europeans alike. (website)
SAVE THE Stock Routes of NSW and Qld: At the Federal National Parks Association
conference – Qld govt wants to enter into legal long-term agreements to lease
stretches of un-used stock route to land owners – NSW wants to sell off the
stock routes to raise funds.
Matthews, Tony. 1997, Chapter 1: ‘The
Indigenous Peoples of the South Burnett’, Landscapes of Change, National
Library of Australia, p5. My View:
When calling Aborigines the “lords of creation” John Matthews, writing
in 1910, I believe is acknowledging Aboriginal prior ownership of the land, but
speculatively, what he may be pertaining to is that they had mastered the art
of re-creation, not inferring any superiority or dominance.
----------------------------------
Additional References for future
studies:
>
SAVE THE Stock Routes of NSW and Qld:
At the Federal National Parks Association conference – Qld govt wants to
enter into legal long-term agreements to lease stretches of un-used stock route
to land owners – NSW wants to sell off the stock routes to raise funds.
> A map of a complex network of
Dreaming pathways that all centre around the pituri lands, appear to follow
along rivers and across them. Pituri was a major trading substance with a
powerful lore. Map 2 – The exchange
of pituri, red ochre and grinding slabs in Queensland and South Australia via
Dreaming pathways between ceremonial centres. Note the distance that goods traveled; ritual songs and dances were also
exchangedalong these routes.Mulvaney & Kamminga, Prehistory of Australia,
map4
>I would like to research where the
Songlines travelled overseas and continued into Indonesia.
>
Aboriginal song cycles from the Simpson Desert and the Cooper: An
integrated linguistic and musicological study Researcher: Grace Koch - Grace Koch is working
with Dr Luise Hercus on a three-year ARC grant to analyse and document song
cycles of the Wangkangurru people of the Lake Eyre Basin. In the 1960s and early 1970, Luise Hercus
recorded considerable data on Aboriginal traditions in the north-eastern part
of the Lake Eyre Basin from elders, now deceased. Some of the song texts match
up with those written down by Police Trooper Samuel Gason in 1879 and by J.G.
Reuther more than 6 decades earlier. Analysis of this data provides the basis
for the project, the aim of which is to make a detailed analysis of the most
important Wangkangurru song-cycles. The
work will provide detailed musicological and linguistic analysis for endangered
language material, filling in a gap in knowledge of the geographical area
inhabited by Wangkangurru people. We have arranged for digitisation of the
tapes held by Hercus and are producing a volume incorporating a textual
analysis of the songs, musical transcription, mapping and a study of the song
styles. Also, we hope to produce a CD of the songs, in conjunction with the
wishes of the community. At present, two song series, Fish and Crane and
Two Boys, have been notated and documented linguistically and
historically. http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/research_program/projects/cultural_transmission
>
Central Australian Religion; Personal Monototemism in a Polytotemic
Community, (Flinders Press, Flinders University of South Australia), by
Professor Ted Strehlow who shows two of his maps illustrating some of the
Songlines running through Central Australia. The map below shows songlines of
dancing ancestral women, then a dreaming of two carpet snakes Kara and Tala -
La.lat.utere.le.laka. It also shows the Rain Dreaming of two rain
ancestors, which runs through the Ewaninga claypan on the old south road 25km
south of Alice. Between carpet snake and rain dreamings are shown the songlines
of Dingo Ancestors, Black Hawk Ancestors and a site of the frost women, all
surrounded by honey ant dreaming. Alice Springs lies between the Carpet Snake
Dreaming Lalatuterelelaka and the Rain dreaming.
>
One of the most informative articles I have found in my research so far,
has been Songlines in Aboriginal Culture at http://www.artistwd.com/joyzine/australia/abr_culture/songlines.php The magnetic songlines guided the physical, ceremonial
journeys of the tribes. Initiated men and women learned to travel these subtle
and invisible energy veins using their psychic or spirit body. Thus they were
able to exchange songs, dance, and mythic visions of the ever-unfolding
Dreamtime reality over great distances. Tribal elders claim that not only
Australia but the entire earth, at one time, was linked through the songlines.
People did not have to abandon their relationship with the beloved region that
"grew" them to relate to the world as a whole.
>
Another article I wish to explore further, by Dan Winter, explains,
perhaps in pseudo-science, the metaphysical dimensions of a songline: …during
aboriginal ritual, a massive collective thrust of emotional momentum, is sent
consciously into the Earth. The gathered collective almost glandular
electricity of tribal ceremony is consciously aimed and focused on an Earth
song line as a kind of conference phone call to record the tribal moment into
the Earth grid. The way a song line works at one level has been described as a
mnemonic device for recalling how to live and eat and move at the various sites
along the Earth walk. http://www.earthportals.com/Portal_Messenger/tribal.html
>
I am
interested in exploring universal concepts of ‘song’, or sound vibrations,
creating the world; the Aboriginal
Creator Beings ‘sang’ all life into existence;
the Hindu Religion credo is that the Universal Sound “Om” began creation
(augmented by recent discoveries); The
Bible tells us “In the beginning was the word…” In 2003, physicist John Cramer of the
University of Washington examined data claimed by NASA to be the heat radiation
left over from the Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago. Cramer’s analysis included transforming the
heat footprint back into sound. Playing
back the sound, he immediately came to a beautiful conclusion: that the first sound was not so much a big
bang but more of a big hum. It takes only a quantum leap to suggest the big hum
was, in fact, the first and biggest Aum (often denoted as Om) – the sound that
manifested the universe. If sound is the
alpha, it’s the omega too. Professor
Adam Burrows of the University of Arizona recently reported that milliseconds
before a giant star dies, it hums a note around the middle C. “It was so unexpected that we kept rechecking
and retesting our results,” said Burrows.
“But we are now certain this phenomenon we were seeing was sound waves.”
>
My own hypothesis is that the Rainbow Serpent could have been volcanos -
after the earth formed a crust, volcanoes began erupting from beneath, gouging
out valleys with rivers of lava, spewing tons of particulates into the
atmosphere which science and history tells us causes massive deluges, which
would have filled the rivers and underground aquifers – the volcanic magma was
cooled immediately by the torrential rain, providing the soil from which all
life on land began – plant life then instigated cycles of rainfall to
perpetuate the system. Oodgeroo’s version of the Rainbow Serpent myth is in
complete accordance with that scenario. (Noonuccal, Oodgeroo and Noonucal,
Kabul Oodgeroo, The Rainbow Serpent, AGPS
Press, Canberra
>
“These songlines are the footprints of their Spirit Ancestors as they
sang Beingness into the landscape, setting the law... Today the journeys of the
Spirit Ancestors are brought to life through these songlines. By performing the
appropriate ceremonies and singing certain songs at precise points along the
Dreaming Track, the Aboriginals gain direct access to the Dreaming. Many groups
travel along Dreaming Tracks with their children, educating them by telling
them stories of the Dreamtime. Through the verses of these songs, Aboriginal
Australians know every part of the landscape and where to find sources of water
and food. They also use the songlines when they move about within the territory
of the tribe or when visiting other tribes.” http://www.blessingscornucopia.com/Aboriginal_Australia_Totemic_Dreamtime_Dreaming_Tracks_Songlines.htm
>
Previous work in Songline recognition: Email to The Landmarks
Foundation: I note that your group
is trying to conserve a 5,000-year-old earthworks, the 'largest ritual
gathering place' in Britain. I also note that your group's mission is to
'conserve sacred sites and landscapes around the world'. I'd therefore like to draw
your attention to a very ancient sacred landscape in Australia, the
Bunya Lands, covering a vast area and mountain range in SE
Queensland, that has been a gathering place for humans for at least 60,000
years, probably for far longer – Burnum Burnum maintains it was the first
meeting place of mankind. People would have gathered there for the annual
harvest of nutritious nuts, from humanity's very beginnings. It is the
telluric and social hub of the continent, where all the Songlines (major
migratory routes) converge. From there evolved over the millennia an
incredibly complex ceremonial event, directly or indirectly (through
trade) involving the population of the entire continent - the bunya nut
united them as one people. Participating tribes had allotted trees for
their own harvest waiting for them after their long migration. It was
the biennial or triennial event (according to the size of that year’s
fruiting) where sacred ceremonies were carried out, their 'Olympic' games
held, goods traded, marriages arranged, problems and grievances aired and
sorted out, formidable amounts of information exchanged - a
mind-bogglingly complex interaction of the nation's tribes.
Thornborough Henge was obviously a very important gathering place for Britain's
ancient peoples, but how much MORE culturally significant, to all of
humanity, is this unique, primordial sacred territory? Yet it does not receive
any recognition as such, although the mountains were made a
National Park for their ecological values. It would be an
archaeologist’s paradise – the signaling fires alone would provide evidence of
how far back into antiquity these events had been held. Time Team were
informed of human skeletal remains discovered in the 19th century when
digging a well, that might have eclipsed Talgai man, but they were not
interested. There are currently moves to have the mountains
listed as a World Heritage site, and a submission is being
placed with the IUCN to make the Dreaming Track known as the Rainbow Serpent
Songline, registered protected landscape from its crossing place on Murullbakgera
(River of the Breathing Fish - The Burnett River) to the Mountains. This will
open up a great many tourism, conservation & other economic opportunities
for Aboriginal people and non-indigenous Australians alike. Please contact me for more information if you
could help efforts to conserve and restore this sacred landscape and help
Indigenous people revive this incredibly important cultural event. Maureen Brannan S>A>N>E> (Save Australia's
Natural Environment) PO Box 214
MURGON Qld 4605 PH: 04 277
10523
>
I draw a contrast between the Dreaming Tracks and the Great Driver Belts of
Chinese credo, two massive rivers of flowing magnetic energy that girdle the
planet, carrying earth currents along two planetary grids which cross at Bali
and Lake Titicahu. These appear to be geographic phenomena.
>
The Songline of the Sydney Olympic Ceremony: Part of the Seven Sisters Creation Journey performed at the
2000 Sydney Olympic Opening Ceremony:
“We remember the Olympic Awakening Ceremony …. Three hundred and fifty
Aboriginal desert women from Central Australia poured out onto the Olympic
Stadium, forming a solid heart core of dancers, pounding with their feet the
sound of the original Creation Ancestors of this vast continent. They danced
part of the Seven Sister´s, or Inma Kungkarangkalpa, the Creation journey of
the sisters who traversed Australia before rising to the skies forming the
Pleiades constellation. The particular segment they danced celebrates their
travels between Cave Hill and Innga, near Amata in the Pitjantjatjara Lands of
South Australia.” (find website)
>
YIDINJII WALKWAY REFERENCE in
unpublished manuscript: Running
through the heartland of Nungabana's traditional country was a major Aboriginal
Trading Route and Seasonal Migration Trail, known as the "Yidinji
Walkway". Nungabana says it was a highway, the "Main Drag"
between the coast and the Atherton Tablelands for Aboriginal
People. By the early 1980's, the trail was long abandoned, almost
forgotten. Neither Nungabana nor, it seems likely, any other Aboriginal
person had walked it for more than 40 years. Most of the trail had been
obliterated by clearing for sugar cane and dairy farms and by forestry
activities. But a central 20km long section in steep, relatively
inaccessible country survived. This intrigued Jeanette Covacevich from the
Queensland Museum. Anthropologist Bob Dixon, who had interviewed
Nungabana twice in the mid 1970's as he went about documenting Yidinji
Language and history, suggested to Covacevich that Nungabana may be able to
help "re-discover" the trail. Ironically enough, Nungabana was
building roads for real estate subdivision in the controversial Daintree
lowland forest when Covacevich caught up with him. "She waited at the
barge there for me one Friday Afternoon. She asked me if I could lead 'em
down the Yidinji Walkway, she heard of it and she wanted to put it on the
map. I've always had that longing to go back. And when the
proposition was put to me, I just jumped at it". Nungabana,
Covacevich, a botanist, an ornithologist and three assistants set off to walk
the trail in September 1983. It was a big thrill - but things had changed.
Rainforest was creeping into the open forest. That's when I notice, no
more wallabies up here, no more wallaroos. Lantana everywhere, bindi
grass, lots of burrs. But mainly the bladey grass and the kangaroo grass
had been taken over by burr and lantana. The scrub, well it sort of
managed itself. But traditionally the forest was always burnt so the wild
geese and bandicoots and whatever lived in the forest could have fresh
grass. They was always there. There's `nothing there
now. Finish. Gone. There used
to be plenty of platypus and water goanna, miles of 'em, and turtles, a lot of
turtles. But that creek never had much eel in it. I've only seen
about three eels in that creek in my lifetime. But there was platypus, eh,
every waterhole had a platypus in it, two or three sometimes. And water
dragons. They'd be sittin' on two or three rocks around a waterhole and
they'd dive in. Now, I never see one. I've seen one when I first went
down with Jeanette and that's the last one I've seen. And I seen a shell
of turtle on a rock. That's all. No more turtles. But what I
find is these pesticides from the farms, goin' down the creek. And another
thing I find, too, is improved pastures going down to creeks. Grass seeds,
yeah. You might think, "What would that have to do with it,
eh?". But you know, turtle and goanna, they lay eggs. And the
sand patches that used to be on the side of the creeks they're full of
grass. They still come out and lay their eggs, but the little ones can't
get back in the creek, they get tangled up in the grass and die. I reckon
that's what's the cause of extinction of turtle and goanna. But
platypus, I don't think they like the water any more. See the water's not
pure enough for 'em to swim around. I do believe that. From “Two Lives”
working title of George Davis Biography by Lori Macorben
---------------------------------------------------------------------
OTHER BOOKS I WOULD LIKE TO BUY OR ACCESS
CONCERNING THE SONGLINES:
>
'In the Tracks of a Rainbow Indigenous Culture and Legends of the
Sunshine Coast' by Robin A Wells, Gullirae Books, Qld, 2003.
> 'Aboriginal Pathways in Southeast
Queensland and the Richmond River' by J G Steele, University of Qld Press,
1984.
>
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
>
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
>
Steele J G, Aboriginal Pathways, University of Queensland Press
