A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1190 entries
songline
A songline is a route across Aboriginal Australian country recorded in a sung sequence, in which the order of the verses is the order of the places along the way. The song encodes waterholes, landmarks, boundaries, and the events of the Dreaming that made them, so a person who knows the song can navigate country they have never walked. Some run for hundreds or thousands of miles and cross many language groups, with each group holding its own section.
Etymology
The English term is a translation offered for a set of concepts that have their own names in the languages concerned, and it was popularized outside Australia by Bruce Chatwin’s 1987 book of that title, which is a travel narrative rather than an ethnography and should be read as one. Aboriginal writers and researchers generally use the term alongside their own, and the concept is not a single uniform thing across the continent.
Notes
What makes them work as navigation is that the sequence is fixed and the melodic contour is reported to track the shape of the ground, so the song is a record with an internal order that cannot be shuffled. They are also property; a section belongs to particular people who have the right and the obligation to sing it, and the responsibility passes down specific lines.