Songlines

Tracking country, law and story · a map

As custodians and museums describe them: Songlines are paths across Country that carry law, story, and navigation together — sung, walked, and passed on, one telling among many held by their custodians.

How to read it

This page describes only what has been shared publicly by custodians, most visibly through the National Museum of Australia's 2017 exhibition on the Seven Sisters songline, developed with Anangu, Martu and Ngaanyatjarra knowledge holders. Specific sacred content stays with its custodians; nothing here stands in for it.

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Country

known in Aboriginal English simply as Country

A songline is a map of Country.

A songline is described as a path that runs across Country — the land, water and sky together, understood as alive and related to those who belong to it. Walking or singing the line is said to be a way of knowing that Country.

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Law

Tjukurpa (Pitjantjatjara), Jukurrpa (Warlpiri)

The line carries how to live rightly.

Custodians describe songlines as carrying law — the obligations, relationships and right ways of acting that were set down by ancestral beings. English translations like “Dreaming” are widely said, by Aboriginal people themselves, to fall short of what this law holds.

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Story

an ancestral being's own creation account

Every place along the line has a story.

Each stretch of a songline is tied, custodians say, to events from an ancestral being's journey — how a place was made, what happened there, and why it matters now. The story and the place are held as inseparable.

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Song

sung verses that mark each site

The words are said to hold the place.

Songlines are sung as well as walked: verses said to correspond to specific features of the land, sung in order as the journey is retraced. Custodians describe the song itself as a form of the knowledge, not a decoration on it.

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Navigation

also said to mark old trade routes

The line also shows the way across land.

Researchers and custodians alike describe songlines as practical routes — ways of finding water and landmarks across vast distances, and paths that traditional trade in goods such as ochre is said to have followed for a very long time.

What is shared here is one telling; the rest stays with those who hold it.

National Museum of Australia's Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters (2017), developed with Anangu, Martu and Ngaanyatjarra custodians; W.E.H. Stanner on the limits of “Dreaming” as a gloss.