First Knowledges Songlines

The Power and Promise

Margo Neale, Lynne Kelly

• Publisher: Thames & Hudson Australia
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781760761387
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

Let this series begin the discussion.' - Bruce Pascoe'An act of intellectual reconciliation.' - Lynette RussellSonglines are an archive for powerful knowledges that ensured Australia's many Indigenous cultures flourished for over 60, 000 years. Much more than a navigational path in the cartographic sense, these vast and robust stores of information are encoded through song, story, dance, art and ceremony, rather than simply recorded in writing.Weaving deeply personal storytelling with extensive research on mnemonics, Songlines: The Power and Promise offers unique insights into Indigenous traditional knowledges, how they apply today and how they could help all peoples thrive into the future. This book invites readers to understand a remarkable way for storing knowledge in memory by adapting song, art, and most importantly, Country, into their lives.About the series: The First Knowledges books are co-authored by Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers; the series is edited by Margo Neale, senior Indigenous curator at the National Museum of Australia.Forthcoming titles include: Design by Alison Page & Paul Memmott (2021); Country by Bill Gammage & Bruce Pascoe (2021); Healing, Medicine & Plants (2022); Astronomy (2022); Innovation (2023).

1

PERSONAL PERSPECTIVES

LYNNE KELLY

Why, oh why was I taught nothing at school about Aboriginal intellectual achievements? Why was I taught nothing about memorising my lessons using song, story, dance and bringing to life the landscape all around me?

I am mortified to have to admit that for much of my life I knew almost nothing about this country’s First Nations cultures. Like most of my generation, educated in the 1950s and 60s, I had the impression that Indigenous people were fairly ‘primitive’, with superstitious beliefs and no understanding of science. What little we were taught was about how the British ‘discovered’ Australia and brought civilisation to our hot, dry shores. It was mentioned in passing that there had been Aboriginal people here, but my impression involved black men holding spears, and little more. It is horrifying to think of the proportion of Australians who emerged from our education system as ignorant as I was.

It was only when I started researching animal behaviour for a science book on crocodiles that I realised that Indigenous stories were not simple folklore but encoded accurate information about the local species. And I understood this after only reading the public stories, the equivalent of children’s tales in Western society.

It finally dawned on me: Aboriginal people would not have survived if they had lived in a fog of superstition and non-scientific thinking.

I started finding Aboriginal science everywhere. It wasn’t just the big animals like crocodiles and kangaroos that the people could identify and tell you a vast amount of detail about their habits. They knew all the birds, numbering in the hundreds. Most people I know could barely name a dozen of the most common birds, and this would be considered incredibly ignorant within an Aboriginal culture. Then I found studies of Indigenous knowledge of the hundreds of insects and other invertebrates in their environments. Add in hundreds of plants, unbelievable distances for travel, land management, genealogies, astronomy, legal systems, ethical expectations … The list, I found, goes on and on.

My thinking became dominated by a single question: how the hell do they remember so much stuff?

That was how I stumbled on the fact that Indigenous cultures have memory skills that I desperately needed. I have a pathetically bad natural memory. At school, subjects like history and legal studies were very difficult for me, while foreign languages were nigh on impossible. I tried three different languages at school and again as an adult, studying for long hours, but my brain simply wouldn’t retain the vocabulary. So I stuck to the subjects I could do using logic: mathematics, physics and computing.

I started my PhD research when I was in my fifties, looking at Indigenous knowledge of animals. In one of our first meetings, my supervisor, Professor Susan Martin, suggested that I investigate ‘orality’ and read Walter J Ong on the topic. Having never heard the term, I wrote down ‘morality’, wondering if I had already broken with some kind of doctoral etiquette. I discovered that Ong, author of the influential book Orality and Literacy,¹ was talking about the use of song, story, dance and a raft of other techniques to make information memorable by cultures in the world that did not use a written script. It was my first baby step to understanding how First Nations people could remember so much stuff.

But what Ong and other orality researchers did not tell me about was the land. There was no mention of Dreamings or Songlines.

Having encountered very few Aboriginal people where I lived in southern Victoria, it was a revealing moment early in my research when I met an elder at the Koorie Heritage Trust in Melbourne. He told me that the key to his way of knowing was his Country, and that singing the names of sacred sites along the Songlines created in his mind a set of subheadings to the entire knowledge base of his culture, a place for knowing about every animal, plant and person. He could sing his Songlines even when away from Country because he could move through the space in his imagination. His Country was always part of him.

I was very excited by this concept, and even more so when I tried to set up my own Songline and found that, suddenly, I could remember things.

My first experiment was to memorise the countries of the world. I found a list of them in population order and placed the most populous, China, just inside the entrance to my study, imagining a Chinese meal being delivered. Then I placed India at the bookshelf (a full Bollywood production going on underneath) and the USA at my desk, with a rather frightening image of President Donald Trump taking over my chair. Around the house and garden I went, astounded at how easily I could add a few countries each day. After 120 countries, I ventured out into my street. Circling a few blocks, allocating a country to each house, shop and side street, I soon had more than 200 countries and independent protectorates firmly in place.

Once I had hooks for the countries literally grounded in my landscape, I wanted to know more about each country and the relationships between them. Just as Aboriginal people have done with their Songlines for millennia, I started to build complexity on the firmly grounded structure. I started creating Songlines for all of prehistory and history, finding myself noticing details in my surroundings that had been simply background before. I became emotionally engaged with my landscape. I was starting to get a tiny glimpse of what Aboriginal people had tried to explain to me. I added characters whenever they belonged in the history pathway. My neighbourhood became alive with people from the past and their stories: Einstein and Homer, Jane Austen and Joan of Arc.

Even if I don’t engage with them every time I walk around my house and garden or through the streets, they are always there, rooted in the memory locations or travelling with me. In my imagination, or in the physicality of my neighbourhood, I can walk through every space on earth, through every country and across every continent and ocean. I can walk through time from the incomprehensible past to the inconceivable future. I now have somewhere to put every person, every country, every event, all the towns and lakes, oceans and rivers, every book and war, every human triumph and failing. My Songlines seem infinite already. My landscape has come to life; it is no longer passive. I can’t stop asking questions. Was King John of England aware of the incredible culture at Great Zimbabwe or of the Ancestral Pueblo, both flourishing during his reign? Why did I know so little about Bangladesh when its population is so much larger than that of Russia, Japan, Germany or England?

I started to discover that there were the equivalent of Songlines all over the world: Native American pilgrimage trails, Pacific Islander ceremonial roads and ancient Inca ceques.

As I gained more insight into the way Songlines work, even at this superficial level, the more horrified I became about the past. If I was becoming so engrossed in my landscape after only a year or two of experimenting, how intense must it be for people who have lived their entire lives this way, as did their parents and grandparents, as have their forebears and ancestors for all of time? How traumatic must it have been to witness invaders build fences across Country and shoot anyone who tried to visit their sacred sites? The physical cruelty must have been horribly exacerbated by the intellectual deprivation. When Native Americans were marched off their lands into reservations, they called it ‘the walk of tears’.

I started experimenting with the other memory devices I was learning about from Indigenous people. I was glimpsing the way in which art in many forms is integral to knowledge systems, and I began to copy them. I chose to copy the lukasa of the West African Luba people, even though I struggled to believe that a piece of carved wood with beads and shells attached could act as the effective memory device described in the research. These memory boards are miniature landscapes; the pathways through them are miniature Songlines. They have counterparts in every Indigenous culture, most profoundly in the art of Australia’s First Nations.

Unlike the Luba memory experts with their long-established designs, I just grabbed a piece of wood and attached beads willynilly. I decided then to encode a field guide to the birds of my state, numbering over 400. Each bead became a family; I sang the families. Each family has a story attached, giving me all the species in it and information about them. The birds morphed into humans and back into birds again, depending on where the story took me. There’s a long story for the thirty-six types of honeyeater, but very short stories for those with only one species. Despite my slapdash approach, my lukasa worked a treat. A second lukasa, which I designed more carefully and based more accurately on the Luba examples, was much easier to encode.

My Songlines, songs, stories, memory boards and artworks all meld seamlessly into a system that is far more complicated to describe than it is to use. My brain just jumps to the song or image it needs at any given moment. At first I could not explain the system to friends when they asked about it: it was too much like hypertext and too little like the linear flow of a book. I could only explain small portions at a time, demonstrating or giving examples, and now understand why it is almost impossible for Indigenous peoples to explain their knowledge systems. One Mutthi Mutthi man said it is too hard to explain from within the complexity of what you know so well. He asked me: ‘How would you explain your knowledge system? Ours is so different that we don’t have the right words in English.’

I gained a profound insight into this different way of thinking from Native American Pueblo writer Alfonso Ortiz and his colleague Richard I Ford, a botanist and anthropologist. From their work I learnt that in contrast to the yellow corn familiar to Western diets, Pueblo corn comes in a variety of colours, from almost black to white, and each type succeeds in different climatic conditions. Corn cross-pollinates very easily, and Pueblo farmers have for centuries – if not a great deal longer – planted their different colours in combinations. They plant each colour in a separate field, with the fields scattered and bordered by other crops as a buffer. They plant in a way that ensures nearby colours ripen at different times so as to reduce cross-pollination. All of this serves to reduce the high risk of total loss and the consequent starvation that could occur if they planted a yellow corn monoculture.

Ford writes about the Pueblo rules for seed selection and guides for planting in a Western scientific way, while Ortiz relates the stories of the Corn Mothers and Corn Maidens who encode the knowledge of corn. I fully understood Ford’s explanation, but the Pueblo way of thinking was so unfamiliar to me when I first read about it that I struggled to see the connection to survival. Ortiz recommends that his readers read Ford’s work as complementary to his own. Ford explains that whether informed by agricultural science or Pueblo mythology, the outcome is the same: rigorous management of corn varieties enables survival in a harsh and unpredictable climate. Both archives encode the same information, just using very different storage formats.

The neuroscience of our brains is the common factor that led cultures all over the world, and throughout time, to create memory devices that brought their landscapes to life and ensured that they would not lose the knowledge essential to survive both physically and culturally. We know that mnemonic devices were universally used by cultures who were heavily dependent on their memories for survival. Wouldn’t the same be true for cultures who are no longer here to explain their knowledge to us, such as those who built the ancient but enigmatic monuments that still stand around the world, with no one left to tell their stories?

I visited Stonehenge. How would Neolithic people have preserved their Songlines as they gradually settled in one place and farmed? The pattern at Stonehenge was similar to the thousands of other stone and timber circles across the UK, Western Europe and North America, and as far as Easter Island. The materials used reflected those available in the local environment and the decorated objects indicated independent cultures, but the underlying structures were remarkably similar. I was able to find clear archaeological evidence for ancient knowledge spaces, with constant reference to the landscape. It seemed clear that these cultures had represented their Songlines and sacred places locally with standing stones and decorated posts, astronomical alignments and decorated objects. They had created essential public and restricted performance spaces in every case. Archaeologists study the Neolithic monuments built by oral cultures only 5000 years ago. Why haven’t they asked for advice from Aboriginal elders whose oral cultures date back at least 65,000 years?

I completed my PhD and wrote a few books. But readers kept asking me the question I so keenly wanted to avoid: how could these techniques be used to learn a foreign language? I had to face the demons that had haunted me since my schooldays.

I took on French. I created Songlines and sacred sites, sang songs and engaged with characters, created stories. I was learning in a different way – vivid, visual and emotional – and gained much insight and pleasure from the process. Then I became really ambitious and decided to learn Mandarin. French and Mandarin are so different that I had to adapt my methods, but underneath there were still Songlines and songs, stories and dance, and a world full of characters.

Everything I was learning started to mesh together. The geography and history and art of China integrated with the language I was learning. The birds became part of the environment, not separate entities. I could see that everything had a place and was named and could be known. I understood that for Aboriginal people, Country was a network of knowledge on a grand scale, and was amazed that throughout my life I had never been exposed to something so powerful.

Non-Indigenous observers report their surprise at the emotional response displayed when the place names from a Songline are sung, but I am no longer surprised about this. When I list the locations of one of my Songlines, my world is full of characters, images, funny or sad or frightening stories, and a precious store of knowledge. I sing my songs in the shower. I sing when I am cooking or gardening. Loud and clear, I sing my knowledge. My Songlines are now so familiar that I feel a strong emotional attachment to them. They are home. I could not have understood this had I not tried it myself.

I was shocked then to find that I was still not experiencing even a fraction of the power of Songlines. I travelled to Canberra in early 2018 to see the National Museum of Australia’s exhibition Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters, curated by Senior Indigenous Curator Margo Neale in collaboration with a community curatorium. The exhibition took me on a journey through the desert lands of many Australian Aboriginal cultures, including those of the Martu, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara peoples. The stories were told and sung and danced. They were bawdy, emotional, frightening and humorous, stacked with adventure and tension. They were everything a good narrative should be. For that reason, the knowledge they contain has remained memorable for millennia, and will continue for as long as the stories are told and performed.

The Indigenous storytellers in the exhibition told their ancient narratives using multimedia, enabling me to hear exactly how Indigenous voices express their Songlines. I saw some of the most evocative art I have ever seen; pictures in books could not move me as these artworks did. But the most revealing experience was under a huge dome, where visitors could lie down and be taken by Aboriginal voices through Country, an ever-changing landscape. Becoming immersed in this ‘third archive’, I realised I still had a very long way to go to fully experience even my comparatively small Songlines. I went back to the museum three times to enter this world, and it became less alien with each visit.

My world now is much richer than it was before. I have lost none of the love I have for books and technology, but now I have a swag of new tools to learn in a different way. The pragmatic and the mythological, the utilitarian and the emotional, the Indigenous and the Western all meld into a wonderful complex whole. Now that I have experienced this third archive, I will never stop learning.

MARGO NEALE

Like Lynne, I could ask why, oh why was I not taught about my people at school? And furthermore, when I was, why was I taught such a limited and demeaning version?

The truth is probably that this is all the dominant culture itself knew about us, and they had no desire to know more – if indeed they believed there was more. After all, if there was more, there was no point knowing about it as our extinction was imminent.

Aboriginal people, viewed as remnants of a bygone age, were studied by a handful of academics and some enthusiasts motivated by a ‘salvage’ mentality to save what remained of the culture before it disappeared. Of course, in our school years we didn’t know about the massacres, the strychnine-laced flour, the Black Wars, the taking of children, our freedom fighters and the protests. All of this bears some comparison to the general German public claiming ignorance of the Holocaust. It was the job of the missionaries to give us a dose of Christianity and ‘smooth the pillow of a dying race’, granting Aboriginal people a passport to the afterlife. Little did they know that we had already taken care of all that eons before Christianity, and with passports that never expired or got withdrawn.

We were viewed as a culture without civilisation, with no books and no history – only myths and legends to amuse and entertain us around the fire at night. The new arrivals to this continent could not see that we had a complex religion and spirituality, that our ‘voodoo-type’ objects were sacred artefacts and our weapons were tools for hunting food sustainably. Perhaps it’s just as well they didn’t know this, as they may have seen our material culture as competition to the Bible, and destroyed it.

The colonisers thought we had no houses and no clothes and were just vagrant wanderers. Such opinions were...