Songlines, a 2020 Christmas present, was a fascinating read when my focus was on the short-term events, like the COVID disaster and the spectacle of US politics. It reminded me how life unfolds through sequences of big and little crises. But life goes on despite these dramas because, in the end, people must change with the times: they either face imperatives or die.
The Seven Sisters exhibition at the National Museum in Canberra was the point of departure for this book, which is the first in a series. The authors, an Aboriginal and a non-Aboriginal woman, used that event and its particular songline to anchor their wider discussion of songlines –– a means of storing and learning knowledge –– in Indigenous cultures in Australia and around the world.
Songlines are a kind of archive but, unlike Western archives or libraries full of books, the knowledge is stored in people’s memories, habits of mind and tangible routines that become visible when they are performed through art, song, dance, ritual, ceremonies and ways of living connected to country. This way of knowing was displaced by writing and other technologies in Western cultures but, in Australia and amongst other Indigenous peoples elsewhere, the mnemonic effects of songlines and equivalent memory practices live on.
The Seven Sisters exhibition was significant because it made Seven Sisters songline available to everyone. It drew attention to the importance of that continent-spanning story to First Nation peoples and invited non-Indigenous Australians and other visitors to recognise and respect the knowledge that is carried through that archive. But it also drew attention to the way First Nation people are now using Western knowledges and technologies in what is a live, continuously growing third archive.
The chapters in the book introduce the idea of songlines as an archive that parallels Western archives, and also draw attention to the cultural interface, where the third archive is growing. This ‘third archive’ acknowledges the growing range of knowledge building and how it realised and performed using different combinations of Western and Aboriginal (memory-based) cultural practice.
The authors suggest this third archive invites all Australians to build shared knowledges that respect Western and Indigenous knowledge practices. It also recognises that everyone is located by memory-based songlines that are:
"linked to place via their family lineage, their conception site and birth site. With this identity comes particular sets of knowledge eked out over time through age-grading rituals and accompanied by increasing levels of responsibility to maintain the received knowledge and the place where that knowledge resides." (p. 50).
The final chapter is an invitation to all Australians to draw on these Indigenous knowledge techniques and recognise the relationship between knowledge, memory and tangible cues. Linking facts, events and stories to locations helps people remember things because this is how human brains store information. Anchoring these memory techniques in stories, filled with characters, actions and moral positions, helps to ground people in place, strengthening their sense of belonging and the lineage from their ancestors.
This invitation to bring songlines into my own life really got me thinking about my family and our family stories. Especially at Christmas, we have rituals where we sing the Christmas pudding to the table wreathed in flickering blue-brandy flame. These memories are steppingstones to places: our Yorkshire habits around Hogmany and Cornish food traditions, making pasties, saffron buns and heavy cake.
These reflections also alert me to my cultural responsibilities. As a person who travelled from England to Australia, I now live here with Australian-born children and grandchild. It’s easy to forget the old traditions when you move to another country but, while my children must innovate, I can also sustain the stories and offer them certain kinds of knowledge: an identity from somewhere and somewhen that is a tangible point of departure.
Title: Songlines: The power and the promise
Author: Margo Neale and Lynne Kelly
Published: October 2020
Publisher: Thames & Hudson with National Museum of Australia,
Category: Non-fiction