‘Songlines’ had entered the lexicon by the early 1990s. It is now embedded in several dictionaries, although none seems to agree on a consistent interpretation of the term. Here is the Macquarie Dictionary’s rather question-begging entry: ‘a Songline is a path made by the ancestors in the Dreaming and recorded by the Aboriginal peoples living along its sometimes very great lengths’. Is it an actual path or not, and if not how is that people live along it? Whose ancestors? What is the Dreaming? How did Aboriginal peoples record it? How long are ‘sometimes very great lengths’? The Australian National Dictionary entry is more succinct, conveying both the nature of an ‘ancestor’ and what the ‘recording’ might be: songline: ‘a route taken by an ancestral being or beings on a journey through a particular landscape and recorded in song’. But this definition also misses the mark by inferring that a songline might drift free, as a route frequented only by ancestral beings, rather than by Aboriginal people themselves, for example. With its navigational coda, Wikipedia’s entry comes closest to Chatwin’s formulation:

Within the animist belief system of Indigenous Australians, a songline, also called dreaming track, is one of the paths across the land (or sometimes the sky) which mark the route followed by localised ‘creator-beings’ during the Dreamtime. The paths of the songlines are recorded in traditional songs, stories, dance, and painting.

A knowledgeable person is able to navigate across the land by repeating the words of the song, which describe the location of landmarks, waterholes, and other natural phenomena ... By singing the songs in the appropriate sequence, indigenous people could navigate vast distances, often travelling through the deserts of Australia’s interior.

The Songlines
(Franklin Press, 1987 edition)Chatwin’s own definition appears early in the book, for the term had not previously appeared in relation to Aboriginal religion or mythology and he was introducing his international readers to a fresh set of ideas. The term ‘songline’ itself was not a neologism; it had been used previously in musicological contexts in discussions of verse, in Australia and beyond. Indeed, in 1987 musicologists Catherine Ellis and Linda Barwick published a paper titled ‘Musical Syntax and the Problem of Meaning in a Central Australian Songline’ in Musicology Australia. This was a distance adrift of Chatwin’s notion of song-derived lines on landscape, but it is quite likely that his interest in nomadic song had brought the term into view.

In fact, Chatwin had already committed himself to the ‘songline’ paradigm before arriving in the country for the first of two brief visits during 1983 and 1984. His stated interest on arrival was in ‘nomadism’, and it seemed logical that he would seek out Australian Aborigines, having already written firsthand accounts of other nomadic and hunter–gatherer peoples. Nomadism had a particular resonance for Chatwin. He had become rather a nomad himself as he moved around the world, sampling cultures by immersion between writers’ festivals and stints in New York and London. For Chatwin’s principal biographer, Nicholas Shakespeare, Chatwin understood ‘nomadism’ to be an ancient driving force in world cultures and Australian Aborigines ‘were a people on whom he could graft his 15-year-old theory’¹.

That may be, but the real interplay in the book is not between Chatwin and Aboriginal people but between Chatwin and the desert itself. For having located dystopia in the townships and truckstops of Central Australia, Chatwin’s desert utopia emerges from his conversations (often cryptic and incomplete) with a select cast of anthropologist–savants and cryptic Aboriginal informants. In pursuing his interrogatory technique, modelled on Jacques le fataliste, Chatwin believed that he was tapping the eternal cultural truths he had encountered in forgotten corners of other continents, in manuscripts or paintings he had handled as an agent for Sotheby’s auction house, or in the texts of books he admired. This sense of individual epiphany, as evoked by the powerful sense of ‘homecoming’ he had felt while sleeping under the stars with the nomadic Beja people of Africa, far from civilisation, helps to explain why it is that The Songlines is, when all’s said and done, mainly about Bruce Chatwin himself.

The thing to remember about Aboriginal religion and the way it has been constructed in the Australian imagination is that very little of its understanding has been conveyed directly by Aboriginal people themselves. Or to put it another way, the key insights which have been made into Aboriginal cosmology can often be traced to rare and privileged encounters between remarkable Aboriginal men or women who saw the benefit in brokering their esoteric knowledge to a particular, rather select group of Europeans. A smaller number of those Europeans – men and women such as Carl and T.G.H. Strehlow, Francis Gillen and Baldwin Spencer, R.H. Mathews and Daisy Bates, Ursula McConnel and Alfred Howitt, Howard Morphy, Nicolas Peterson, Nancy Munn, Les Hiatt, and Peter Sutton (to name a few) – have possessed the gift of communicating that knowledge. But how many Australians are aware of it?

At first sight one might draw a contrast between the versions of Aboriginal cosmology which have become accessible in a limited way through academic texts, and those which have become widely accessible through art, particularly in the period since Western Desert paintings began appearing over the shoulders of politicians and company directors. Accessibility does not imply understanding, of course, and one only has to read the reductive captions for Aboriginal artworks in major galleries to understand that, once again, we encounter that familiar feeling of encountering a concept without a hard centre. Aboriginal art has shifted so quickly over a short span, during which ideals of innovation and dynamism have largely displaced those of conservatism and reiteration, that the naïve viewer of the works must be experiencing something akin to encountering Carravaggio, Renoir, Constable, Cézanne, and Lichtenstein in the same room. It is hard enough to distil chronologies of style, let alone to discern how the Dreaming might inform the sequence of works, and, if so, whether that concept becomes explicable at all.

Of course, if one attempts to run the thread of ‘the Dreaming’ or ‘songlines’, or even ‘country’ (perhaps the most recent esoteric term), through a gala exhibition of artistic expressions in various media by Aboriginal people from the tropics to the desert and from urban centres and country towns, it is axiomatic that the common denominator will not be resonant with meaning. Even if the popular appetite for such content-rich offerings still seems to be expanding, it is easy to see that the core philosophical concepts of Aboriginal religion are now so diluted in such events that they are close to meaningless. It is arguable that this slippery decline began long before Songlines, perhaps as long ago as 1788.

Bruce Chatwin (photograph by Ulf Anderson, Getty Images)

What of the texts, and particularly those informing Chatwin’s research for Songlines? There is no doubt that Chatwin did an amount of anthropological reading before reaching Australia in 1982. Two authors loomed large from the classical canon: T.G.H. Strehlow and A.P. Elkin. Both discussed Aboriginal song, but not as Chatwin came to see it. Strehlow’s Songs of Central Australia (1971) was unavailable in most overseas libraries, and Chatwin did not sight it until he reached Australia.² He made a particular point of visiting Strehlow’s widow in Adelaide and spent a morning reading through his manuscript material. It provided the revelation Chatwin was seeking: ‘I sat down, only for a morning [and] suddenly realised everything that I rather hoped these songlines would be, just were’³. Strehlow had been the first to study and publish extended series of Aboriginal verse forms, although he had ‘wavered between calling these poems, ‘songs’ or ‘chants’⁴. Chatwin was familiar with Elkin’s work and he may have read his Arnhem Land Music, co-published in 1953 with the musicologist Trevor Jones⁵. Elkin mentioned song cycles and lines along which songs were traded in Arnhem Land. It is here, perhaps, that we can see the origins of Chatwin’s misconception. Elkin and Jones were among the first to discuss and map ‘song routes’, although they made it plain enough that these routes related to the distribution of ceremonial songs, rather than any individual records of travel from site to site⁶. Elkin was to become a great enthusiast for Aboriginal song poetry, and he may have unwittingly supplied the link Chatwin required between the classic corpus of ceremonial song and an individual Aboriginal traveller’s itinerary and obligations. Elkin’s text related to song cycles performed in ritual contexts, in which idealised routes and ancestral paths were reiterated, but his reference to ‘an aid to memory’ may well have suggested something more exciting and radical to Chatwin:

These journeyings took a long time; so do the chanting and singing. The ‘roads’ or routes must be followed and everything of significance sung, because the past is perpetually and casually related to the present ... There is therefore geographical and temporal sequence in the order of the songs and chants, and this is an aid to memory ... While a Songman was chanting unfalteringly, and without notice, the Ngurlmak (or Ubar) ritual psalm-like chants for half an hour’s tape-recording, a headman sitting near by commented that the Ngurlmak according to the text, was now in that country, then in another place, and so on, ever coming nearer, until at last it was just where we were making the recording⁷.

This was the compelling idea underpinning the construction of Chatwin’s ‘songlines’. It is worth noting that when he came to account for this formulation in the book, he did so without reference to any anthropological authority or even to an orthodox view, but only to the knowledge he had gleaned through his visits to Central Australia, particularly through the fictional outsider– anthropologist Arkady, his story’s lead character who had ‘learned of the labyrinth of invisible pathways which meander all over Australia and are known to Europeans as “Dreaming-tracks” or “Songlines”...⁸’ Chatwin’s narrator and Arkady finessed the concept in their rather platitudinous question-and-answer repartee. ‘He went on to explain,’ Chatwin writes, ‘how each totemic ancestor, while travelling through the country, was thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the line of his footprints, and how these Dreaming-tracks lay over the land ...’  This was poetic and harmless enough, but in the uncertain terrain he was negotiating between fact and fiction, Chatwin had more to say:

‘A song’, he said, was both map and direction-finder. ‘Providing you knew the song, you could always find your way across country.’
‘And would a man on “Walkabout” always be travelling down one of the Songlines?’
‘In the old days, yes,’ he agreed. ‘Nowadays, they go by train or car’

Chatwin was by no means the first or the last to reduce complex human behaviour rooted deep in sophisticated cultural mores to such simplicity. In his defence, he had taken the bewilderingly labrynthine Songs of Central Australia as his key text and must have wrestled hard with it. He was unable to glean more from it, though, than the base principle that sites could be revealed through song, and that Aboriginal song had all the qualities and grandeur of epic poetry found elsewhere in the world. The fact that Strehlow’s work lent no credence to the idea that the ritual elicitation of sites along Dreaming trajectories could be harnessed and consulted for everyday commuting across the desert, much like a series of bus routes, seems not to have bothered Chatwin.

T.G.H. Strehlow's first journey to Barrow Creek, 1940s (State Library of South Australia)

For many of those who have grown accustomed to its use, the term ‘songlines’ seems to transmit something essential about Aboriginal cosmology and religion; perhaps the notion of Dreamings conforming to single directional lines appealed to a culture grounded in Kantian linearity. The term posited a simple antidote to the toxic notion of terra nullius; by proposing that the vast continent is laced with songlines, one need not go into ponderous enumeration of the number of Aboriginal languages, or the distribution of Aboriginal groups either pre- or post-contact. As a metaphysical framework, ‘songlines’ are simply there, like a network of broadband cables under the pavement. In fact, I recall the conversations with Peter Sutton and Chris Anderson thirty years ago, when we were preparing Dreamings, as to whether we might include a map of the London Underground in the book, to better illustrate the concept for a broader public. At the time it did appear that if you had the right ticket and knew the song, you could take the Ancestor Line through all the desert stations; I’m sure it was Sutton himself who demurred, having already worked on a dozen land claims and knowing that it was never that simple. It is the complexity of the Dreaming system – the baffling sets of branch lines which diverge and may not converge again, the way the ticket machine works and how the fare is collected, not to mention the hairpin bends and spaghetti junctions.

There is little doubt that Chatwin himself would be astonished to know that the term has stuck, and that it has even more currency today, thirty years later. Partly for that reason it is worth exploring just what he meant by it, how far adrift of the facts he might have been, and whether we might do better today in terms of understanding and explaining the mechanisms of Aboriginal religion, relationships to land, mythology, and song. Of course, every English term for an Aboriginal concept will fall short, but it is important to understand that while ‘Dreaming’ emerged at least partly from discourse between Aboriginal and European people engaged in performance and elicitation of ritual knowledge, ‘songlines’ arrived in Bruce Chatwin’s suitcase.

The fact that it has been taken up by popular culture and, indeed, by some anthropologists, does not alter the fact that the expression also entails other risky assumptions. Chatwin considered that the desert model of long lines of sites applied across Aboriginal Australia, for example, but this is unlikely to have been the case. While all Aboriginal groups for which we have data believe in (or believed in) totemic ancestors, whose actions helped form the landscape and introduced precedents for kinship, language, customs, and material culture, these ancestors were not necessarily the travelling, route-finding ancestors of Central Australia. Indeed, if we turn to the great body of anthropological research still locked away in land-claim files, or to the reports summarising that research, there is a clear consensus that three forms of Dreaming applied in Central Australia:

Travelling Dreamings are those which went on long travels, crossing several estates. Their songs and rituals often involve a meeting of several different groups. Estate Dreamings are those which travelled generally within the estate of a group. Localised Dreamings are those which moved only in a certain locality within an estate; they are usually associated with a particular geographical feature⁹.

No one has satisfactorily mapped the relative proportional distribution of these three main types, but it seems clear that Dreamings of the first type, lending themselves most obviously to the model of extensive Dreaming tracks, are concentrated in the desert regions. Dreamings of the second type become more numerous in northern Australia, and more sedentary Dreamings of the third type are concentrated in south-eastern Australia, where the extended Dreaming tracks model appears least applicable.

Chatwin may not have been concerned by the fact that his songlines model was overtly male in character, having apparently little to do with the lives or trajectories of Aboriginal women. He arrived in Australia too soon to witness the phenomenon of Aboriginal women taking a lead role in the Western Desert art movement, initially at Yuendumu in late 1984, followed by other centres. In the meantime, he reasonably assumed that Aboriginal men were the main decision makers when it came to travel and following ancestral trajectories. He would have been correct in that assumption, although Nancy Munn’s study of Walbiri iconography (1973) would have given him pause for thought if he had consulted it. Munn acknowledged the primacy of the ‘site-path’ framework in the iconography of men’s drawings, by which movement across the landscape is depicted by a sequence of concentric circles (named sites) joined by lines or tracks:

Because of men’s more extensive and precise geographical knowledge, circle-line figures are in wider use among men than women; the close association of this geographical information with the ancestral routes brings it into the sphere of knowledge linked with masculine cult. A woman’s information, on the other hand, is confined primarily to the names of a few major sites along tracks of ancestors within her own segment of the community country... [H]er attention centres upon the various ancestors within her country at large, rather than upon the details of particular ancestral routes. Thus when I asked some women for more precise information regarding site names and the routes of ancestors, they said that I should address these queries to men¹⁰.

Bessie Sims from the Warlukurlangu Artists Aboriginal Association at work at the Yuendumu Art Centre, Yuendumu (photograph by Francis Reiss, NLA)

Munn has not been the only Central Australian anthropologist to observe the distinction between men’s and women’s approaches towards conceptualising and mapping their respective cultural landscapes, although the Aboriginal women’s iconography has rarely been studied in its own right¹¹. That is understandable perhaps when it is realised that anthropologists such as Norman Tindale, Mervyn Meggitt, Fred Myers, and even Munn herself were faced with documenting elaborate, multi-site drawings made by men, while women’s drawings tended towards simplistic circled renderings of single sites. At Ooldea in 1934, for example, Tindale recorded an eight-metre long ground drawing by senior men, detailing aspects of the encounter between the Kunkarunkara (Seven Sisters) and the Wati Nyiru. The drawing was traced as the story was told over a two-hour period, during which ‘the audience had shuffled and moved along the sandy ground, without rising to their feet and thus had kept place with the growth of the pictographic record of the progress of the story’¹². A comparison of this particular drawing with crayon drawings documenting the same set of mythological events (gathered by Tindale and Charles Mountford, among others) makes it clear that the drawing’s execution and content – in terms of what it included and omitted – reflected the knowledge and contributions of those present on that day at Ooldea in 1934. On other occasions, with a different mix of senior men, the drawing might contain a core set of the same desert waters, but might include a range of other localities and apparent detours. To return to the London Underground analogy, we might expect individuals domiciled or based at different points along different tube lines to return variant maps of the system, omitting some sections and including others, if they were asked.

Norman Tindale (left) and Aldo Massola, Curator of Anthropology, National Museum of Melbourne, 1956 (photograph by John Mulvaney)

The rhythm and tempo of Dreaming itineraries is/was not set out in any particular form, let alone proscribed by songs, for those performances might also vary considerably, depending on the presence of key individuals. This is not to say that those individuals would not be reproducing their store of verses with absolute precision. Fred Myers has provided a cadenced account of the travels of the Pintubi man, Maantja, and his various companions around their Western Desert countries during the early twentieth century; we can only conclude that these young men went more or less where they pleased, and with whom, while remaining perfectly aware of the idealised templates of Dreaming ancestors. While there were occasions on which individuals (particularly initiates) would travel under instruction from designated site to site, those were exceptional events. As Myers put it:

Groups were fluid in composition and travelled according to varying circumstances and stimuli, social and environmental rather than ordained by the Dreaming: Individuals or small aggregates of families moved through the landscape for purposes of their own, seeing evidence of other people nearby, going to visit them, travelling with them for a time, and then returning to their own more typical grounds¹³.

One might add that it was this very informality of movement that threw into relief the order, sequence, and logic of the Dreaming-track template, which ritual and song impressed on all those traversing the country in those former times, and which still resonates today, to varying degrees.

The point is that there might be two explanations for the annoying tendency of ‘songlines’ to vary sufficiently from the ideal, settled state assumed by Chatwin. The first is that accepted knowledge of the Dreaming tracks was never crystallised or codified into a single version. It was reconstituted afresh through an endlessly repeating series of differing ritual contexts – endless that is, until the chain of transmission began faltering during the twentieth century.

The second explanation for the variation is allied to the first, but relates to the fact that the Dreaming lies somewhere between a narrative containing a sequence of events, told in historic terms (albeit not necessarily sequential), and a timeless state in which history is collapsed. It is precisely the combination of those two qualities or characteristics, which makes the Dreaming, Jukurrpa, Altjira or whatever else it may be called across the Australian continent, such a remarkable cosmology, one that should not be allowed to slip into reductive caricature. The combination allows the Dreaming to be seen both as a referent for ‘secular’ existence, and as a suddenly expanding sacred field which infuses all and everything.

If the Dreaming has a source and state of stasis, it is in the landscape itself, or its particular features whose genesis can be sheeted home to particular Ancestors, but it is never confined to the landscape. It emanates, and the evidence for its presence (aside from the proof in the landscape) is found in song, art, and embellishment, sacra and knowledge, as well as the living receptacles of ancestral presence – people, animals, plants, things, the elements and any nameable phenomena. All are classified in Dreaming terms, nothing stays outside, and anything strange must be assimilated or shunned altogether.

That the Dreaming can be regarded as a philosophical system or construct has been more or less evident since Spencer and Gillen intensified their fieldwork studies of the Arrernte and related groups during the 1890s. Subsequent anthropologists, particularly Ashley Montagu, William Stanner and Elkin (himself a theologian), came much closer to defining it in philosophical terms. Out of that discourse, which a succession of anthropologists have pursued over subsequent decades, it is possible to distil some defining elements. These seem to apply across Australia, whether in the Western Desert, where the networks of multi-stranded ancestral routes link adjacent local groups and even broader language groups, or in regions such as Arnhem Land or south-eastern Australia, where the site-path framework tends to be reduced to single ‘master narratives’, often overshadowed by more discrete Ancestral ‘events’ and more local allegiances.

Aboriginal art Carnarvon Gorge showing unique clan markers and dreamtime stories (Wikimedia Commons)

The nuances within and between the forms are bewildering in their complexity, but perhaps three main features emerge. The first is that the Dreaming exists without an original cause. The second is that it synthesises the past and the present, reducing history to events extending only so far as one’s grandparents’ time, beyond which timeless totemic identities supersede or extinguish individual identities. The third is the primary role of ritual and associated sacra in enabling what Ashley Montagu termed the ‘essence of the non-apparent’ to be revealed, particularly through initiation. Elkin formulated the Dreaming more than once, but hardly more succinctly than in these terms: ‘For the Aboriginal philosopher or simple believer, the cosmos is the appearance in phenomena, inorganic and organic, of the Dreaming, which in itself does not become phenomena, but without which the latter would not be.’¹⁴

Now this three-part formulation may well be clumsy or difficult to grasp, and it may not satisfy many anthropologists, but perhaps it offers a means of understanding the Dreaming as an actual philosophical system with a core, rather than a cosy zen-like state that might be somehow activated by being ‘on country’ or by knowing the right song. Formulating or defining the Dreaming carries its own risks of course, not the least being to invite criticism from those who might regard any attempt to authenticate a ‘classical’ version as exclusionary and élitist. Surely it is up to Aboriginal people themselves to pronounce on which versions qualify as ‘Dreaming’, and to suggest that transmission has either ceased or no longer delivers the authentic product is a fraught exercise, in political terms at least. That is not my intention, however. I am reminded of Tarkovsky’s extraordinary film Andrei Rublev (1966), in which a fourteen-year-old boy claims that his father, a master bell-maker, had passed him the secrets of the craft before his violent death in a Russian village devastated by civil strife in the Middle Ages. A prince’s emissary who comes to the village specifically to commission a new bell reluctantly engages the boy, with the threat of execution if he is lying. The bell rings truly and one expects to see the boy triumphant. Instead he is devastated, for he had lied. His father had told him nothing – and yet transmission had occurred. This cannot be unlike the situation in which many Aboriginal people find themselves today. Their link to the Dreaming has been severed by colonialism and its effects, but the nature of their inheritance should not be dismissed. Something unique to their experience must fill the gap; the bell need not crack.

By the 1960s, a generation before Chatwin’s Songlines, it had become necessary for anthropologists to qualify their analyses of the Dreaming. This stemmed partly from an awareness that its power and effect had greatly diminished in the wake of Western influence. It also derived from the realisation that the Dreaming need not always conform rigidly to the classical ideal, or to the three precepts mentioned above. The notion that the Dreaming collapses time (or eliminates chronology to the extent that history effectively disappears) has been effectively challenged by the anthropologist Erich Kolig. He observed that while in the idealised Dreaming ‘the world was seen as unalterably determined in its major patterns and quite logically, historical process and knowledge of it paled into total insignificance’, the reality was that the content of the Dreaming was ‘far from stable and unchanging, being constantly subject to revision through the incorporation of new experiences – as long as these could be absorbed without causing a rupture of the traditional doctrine’.¹⁵

We can imagine that the ideal paradigm, in which ‘the past was within the present and the future’, to borrow Elkin’s phrase, with no room for variation or change was tested to the limit on the Arnhem Land coast during the early eighteenth century with the annual arrival of the Macassan fishing fleets, bringing entirely new commodities such as cloth and metal. Records of mythology as well as bark paintings produced during the early twentieth century (not long after the trade was halted by the new federal government in 1911) confirm that the Dreaming system of the Yolngu people did, in fact, accommodate this intrusion. The Macassans were not invaders; they did not threaten the structures of the Yolngu community. Nor, one can say, did the first missionaries in Arnhem Land, or elsewhere in Australia.

In fact, there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that Aboriginal people were intrigued by the missionary proposition of a first cause, something responsible for the Dreaming itself. If that argument could be accepted, then the presence of God could be accommodated as an adjunct to the Dreaming, without necessarily replacing it. This seems to have been what occurred in several mission fields, particularly in Central Australia. In 1967 for example, when Pastor Tom Fleming negotiated with senior Warlpiri men and women to build a church on land at Yuendumu, he addressed a full meeting of the community with the proposition that God had seen their Warlpiri and their Dreamings develop but would now like to settle down with them, in a church built on their land. Would they be prepared to give the land back to God, he asked? Fleming’s proposition was translated into Warlpiri, discussed, and was agreed. The church was completed in 1968. A plaque at its entrance commemorates the Warlpiri decision ‘to give the land back to God’. In the meantime, ceremonial life continued unabated; five years later, Fleming installed a stained-glass window featuring shield designs based on the key Warlpiri Jukurrpa.

Stained glass windows of the Baptist Church at Yuendumu (source: http://www.gospel.pawmedia.com.au)During the 1970s and 1980s there was general agreement among anthropologists that any discussion or evaluation of the Dreaming must take historical change into consideration, and that the paradigm itself had shifted. Two factors intervened to arrest that trend, or at least to prevent that awareness spreading to popular understandings of Aboriginal cosmology. The first was the ongoing effect of the legal claims under the 1976 Northern Territory Land Rights Act; this rigorous process distilled and valorised undisturbed knowledge of Dreaming Ancestors, tracks and sites. While it became obvious that this store of knowledge was retained by a dwindling number of elderly men and women of high degree, with rather thin evidence for continued transmission to a younger generation, this mattered little in the context of the Act and its implementation. The test lay in the moment, not in the future, even as that future descended upon community after community.

The second factor was the extraordinary efflorescence of Aboriginal art, in Arnhem Land but particularly in the Western Desert, where the movement was especially stimulated by the energising effects of the land-claim process and the rise of the outstation movement. This context also spawned a new generation of quasi-anthropologists – often students or individuals seeking an alternative life away from large cities – who became engaged in service industries associated with Aboriginal tourism and most particularly, the remarkable expansion in Aboriginal art centres. This sector began generating its own interpretations of Aboriginal spirituality, forming close relationships with senior men and women, and coming to know the country through Aboriginal eyes. ‘Songlines’ was an accepted term of art among this loose grouping, but a new phrase was also coming into use: being ‘on country’ (without the definite article), indicating the appropriate degree of empathy and insight.

The art movement brought the terms ‘Dreaming’ and ‘songlines’ into everyday discourse in mainstream Australia, from multinational corporate boardrooms to education department curricula. In these contexts, the terms were especially soft-centred, hardly amenable to definition; few felt the need to define them (even in museums and art galleries), and few asked for those definitions. It seemed best that this all remained rather hazy, open-ended and non-exclusive – particularly in terms of who, among a broader range of people defined as Aboriginal, might actually possess the Dreaming and its songlines. There was no doubt at all about the baseline – desert communities and Arnhem Land, Cape York and the Kimberley. As older artists who had grown up ‘foot-walking’ the desert or the Arnhem Land plateau began to fade from the painting scene and younger artists took over, it was easy to assume that they had received their elders’ full knowledge. Certainly, the captions attached to paintings in art centres and galleries did not suggest that any slippage had occurred.

In this way, those earlier initiatives by anthropologists, and some historians, to mark the disjunctions in transmission of the Dreaming, and the fundamental shifts in its hold on Aboriginal cosmology, were somehow diluted and even denied. The media, the art industry, and even museums developed a stake in bolstering the sense of the Dreaming’s continued vitality – so much so, in fact, that the Dreaming seems to have become redefined as a dynamic, innovative force. For the general public, the proof of this lies in a rapidly expanding Aboriginal arts industry embracing all genres in a festive, affirming spirit in which the Dreaming is routinely evoked. In this way, the Dreaming has become assimilated to a timeless and invigorating paradigm of renewal, ahistorical in its character, oddly mirroring the understanding of an ‘eternal present’ held by its own most conservative practitioners.

Are we talking about the same thing? Is the ‘Dreaming’ of the present assimilable to the ‘Dreaming’ which anthropologists of the mid-twentieth century considered to be under such stress? Is its contemporary elasticity an illusion? Has some other dynamic replaced or sidelined the Dreaming so that only a handful of ‘old believers’ and an even smaller number of younger recipients retain the ‘essence of the non-apparent’ which once dominated every flickering campfire across the continent? Was Strehlow correct when he spoke half a century ago of a ‘terrible silence descending’ across the ritual grounds of Central Australia? Is the hyperactive contemporary Aboriginal art scene a defiant attempt to forestall that inevitability, or has it simply gained a momentum which will re-render the Dreaming as an amalgam of beliefs around a ‘songline’ concept?

These questions are worth asking, for they assume that the Dreaming documented in the texts, audio-files, films, and land-claim testimonies must have a hard centre, and even if that centre cannot endure in its old form, Aboriginal people have already ensured that enough of it is known and preserved to constitute a treasured cultural possession which should not be further softened or diluted.

There is no doubt that Chatwin’s Songlines filled a vacuum in the popular imagination. Its durability over three decades suggests that a popular and accessible version of Aboriginal cosmology was always needed, at least as much as the terms ‘never-never’, ‘walkabout’, and ‘Dreamtime’ which constituted earlier attempts to fill that void. But these are poor substitutes for any term which derives directly from Aboriginal philosophical thinking.

The quest is not new of course. One way or another, the idea has exercised the best minds in Australian anthropology and jurisprudence, but the discourse has been largely confined to the academy and the rarefied zone of the land-claim process. Tracing that discourse to its roots in the bush, to the generosity of Aboriginal men and women who have witnessed the vanishing intellectual capital of their own elders and understand the stakes involved, should be the aim.

Thirty years after its publication, it is evident enough that Bruce Chatwin’s book was much less about Aboriginal culture, or ‘songlines’ in particular than about his own rather strained efforts to find a universal human rationale for the nomadic, self-sufficient lifestyle he and his moleskin notebooks now represent. It is probably too easy to belittle Chatwin’s efforts to ‘graft his theory’ onto Aboriginal people of the Western Desert and to place his songline template over their complex cultural processes relating to landscape, belief, and oral literature. After all, Chatwin risked a lot in the name of literature, and in hindsight he trod more lightly than many others in his quest. But whether the Dreaming retains its core or not, it should surely be understood in the terms of its original practitioners and adherents, now that sufficient of us are prepared to listen. Perhaps ‘songlines’ will be overtaken by a new terminology that emerges from Aboriginal languages themselves, terms such as the Warlpiri Jukurrpa, the Warumungu Wirnkarra or the Arrernte Altyerre.

Philip Jones is a historian and museum ethnographer specialising in the historical trajectories of objects and images across cultural boundaries. Based at the South Australian Museum, he is writing histories of the Yuendumu Men’s Museum and of the artist–naturalist George French Angas.

ABR Patrons’ Fellowships, now worth $7,500 each, are funded by ABR’s many Patrons. We thank them warmly for enabling us to publish long-form journalism and for enabling writers and scholars to devote several weeks or months to a substantial topic.

Endnotes

1. Shakespeare, N. 1999. Bruce Chatwin. Harvill, London, p.404.

2. Pers. comm. P. Memmott, February 2017.

3. Shakespeare 1999, p.411.

4. Strehlow, T.G.H. 1971. Songs of Central Australia. Angus & Robertson, Sydney, p.xiii. During the book’s extended editing and publication process Strehlow had made his data available to the musicologists Alice Moyle and Catherine Ellis. The latter freely used the term ‘Aboriginal songs’ in her publications of the 1960s, based partly on Strehlow’s material.

5. Elkin, A.P. and Jones, T.A. 1953. Arnhem Land Music (North Australia). Oceania Monographs no. 9, University of Sydney.

6. Ibid, pp.23-26.

7. Elkin, A.P. 1979. The Australian Aborigines (revised edition), Angus & Robertson, Sydney, pp.303-304.

8. Arkady was based firmly on the Central Land Council contract anthropologist, Toly Sawenko.

9. See paragraph 30 of Murranji Land Claim, Report to Aboriginal Land Commissioner, 1987. The quotation is attributable to Peter Sutton (pers. comm. Feb. 2017). See also claim reports for Ti-Tree Station, Katherine, Tanami Downs, North Simpson, Mistake Creek, Muckaty, Tempe Downs & Middleton Ponds, among reports downloadable at: http://www.dss.gov.au/our-responsibilities/indigenous-australians/publications-articles/land-native-title/aboriginal-land-commissioners-reports.

10. Munn, N. 1973. Walbiri iconography. Graphic representation and cultural symbolism in a Central Australian society. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, pp.130-131.

11. Christine Watson’s Piercing the ground. Balgo women’s image making and relationship to country ( Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2003) provides a notable exception. See also Meredith Rowell, Para 160, Anmatjirra and Alyawarra Land Claim, Report to Aboriginal Land Commissioner, 1980 (ibid).

12. Tindale, N.B. 1959. Totemic beliefs in the Western Desert of Australia. Part 1: Women who became the Pleiades. Records of the South Australian Museum, vol.13, pp.305-332, at p.308.

13. Myers, F.R. 1991. Pintupi country, Pintupi self. Sentiment, place and politics among Western Desert Aborigines. University of California Press, Berkeley, pp.88, pp.79-89.

14. Elkin, A.P. 1969. Elements of Australian Aboriginal philosophy. Oceania vol. 40, pp.85-98, at p.88.

15. Kolig, E. 1995. ‘A Sense of History and the Reconstitution of Cosmology in Australian Aboriginal Society: The Case of Myth versus History’. Anthropos 90, pp.49-67, at p.53.