Bruce Chatwin published his book Songlines in 1987.
From the cover notes:
‘I have a vision of the Songlines stretching across the continents and ages; that where ever man have trodden they have left a trail of song; and that these trails must reach back, in time and space, to an isolated pocket in the African savannah, where the First Man shouted the opening stanza of the World Song, “I am!”’
‘The songlines emerge as invisible pathways connecting up all over Australia; ancient tracks made of songs which tell of the creation of the land. The Aboriginal’s religious duty is ritually to travel the land, singing the Ancestor’s songs: singing the world into being afresh. The Songlines is one man’s impassioned song.’
When the new museum opened in Perth a few years ago, an amazing art exhibition was feartured, ‘Songlines: Tracking the seven sisters’. Amazing artworks of the landscape between the Pilbara and Alice Springs, linking the various groups and the landscape, and the connection with the universe with an incredibly beautiful rendition of the night sky, tying the seven sisters to their place in the earth, on the ground and in the extended universe. A link in time and space, yesterday, today and into forever.
In his career as a journalist, Stan Grant lived and worked for a while in Hong Kong, and was transferred to Beijing. He chose to travel there, with his family, by train rather by ‘plane, to ‘hear the songlines’.
I hadn’t thought of or heard of that experssion, songlines, at the time, but I have travelled across Australia numerous times by ‘plane and now twelve times by road. The connectedness felt from the road travel is powerful, to see the changing landscape, the vastness of the Nullabor Plain, the coastline to the Southern Ocean, seeing whales, the South Australian shatter belt, Yorke Peninsula and the Flinders Range, seeming to rise from the horizon. The sense of the vastness of the land, contrasted with an in flight movie, a nap, a read of a magazine before landing in Sydney or Melbourne.
The sense of connection with the landscape and the people who occupy it is important, unifying, but when that connection is lost, or if it does not exist, the people we meet are strangers, as we are to them, other, if you will. The ‘otherness’ of people creates fear, misunderstanding, a loss of identity, an alienation.
New immigrants find this, and seek out community in their immigrant circles, be it through church or mosque, temple or synagogue, holding fast the comfort of a shared culture. Some for the rest of their lives, for others as means to transition from immigrant to adopting the culture of the new land. The immigrant takes comfort from the songlines of home as they adjust to a new life, as they step out of their comfort zones to connect with the newness of their host country, their host community.
But what happens when the songlines are not heard, when the separation from cultural roots which are such powerful markers for personal identity are not there, have not been passed on from one generation to the next?
These questions were resonant this morning as a group met for coffee at a local cafe. A window had been shattered, during the night, some kids had pushed an abandoned shopping trolley through the plate glass window and proceeded to destroy other furniture in the cafe, but the most destructive was the fun they had throwing raw eggs around. That mess was the hardest to clean up. CCTV footage showed a couple of kids, about 10 years old doing the damage, eating the snacks they found in the display cabinet and upturning furniture, finding the refrigerator and just having a (wrecking) ball before making their escape through the shattered window. The children are ‘known to the police’. Apparently, they have form, are a bit disruptive… and are Aboriginal.
What should we do with those kids?
The meeting was with a candidate for the upcoming state election, and so the discussion ventured to the ‘tough on crime’, ‘adult time for adult crime’ type of thing, lots of examples of bad things happening and an admission that we have not handled youth crime and particularly Aboriginal youth crime very well. Nothern Territory and Queensland governments have decided that they will really toughen up, redefining the age of criminal responsibility and other drastic, punitive measures.
A tough on crime policy would lead to the construction of new prisons, new youth detention facilities, more police, more resources thrown at a miserably failing system, where other countries, like the Netherlands are closing prisons, 23 since 2014, and finding better ways to deal with crime. With suspended sentences, education, mental health support, dealing with drug and alcohol dependence, and community work orders. By taking ‘criminals’ out of the crime universities we call prisons, and enabling convicted people to remain in work, to remain in their communities has seen recidivism rates drop from over 60% to less thatn 20%.
There are other ways to deal with crime, but it takes courage to break the mould of the punitive systems we have established.
So what has all this to do with songlines?
Quite a bit actually.
Songlines form part of a cultural definition, who are we is defined by the various cultural markers we carry, out beliefs, our faith, our understanding of how to deal with other people and so forth. Arriving here from The Netherlands in 1954, my parents joined a Dutch Church, through that church my father got work, we established social connections, we retained so much of our identities as being Dutch, but gradually the children transitioned into becoming Australians more so than the parents. The ‘songlines’ were in part the traditions we brought with us, celebrating Sint Nicholaas Day on 5 December instead of the ‘commercialised’ Australian Christmas, at least until the kids kicked up and we joined the rest of Australia giving gifts on 25 December.
We see the same in immigrant communities today, African women wearing beautifully coloured clothing, Jewish men wearing the kippah or yarmulke, Muslim women with headscarves, men wearing the jubba or dishdasha, Sikh men with turbans and long beards. The songlines, reinforced with worship centres, mosques, temples, churches, synagogues to carry forward the cultures, the ways of interpreting their place in the world, past, present and into eternity. The hold on to tradition, onto cultures is part of defining who people are, some enforce it ‘religiously’, others use it as a means of transitioning into the new culture of the host country.
But with our First Nations people, their culture has been in large measure ripped away from beneath them. Leaving many in a cultural desert, a no-man’s land. Disfunctional family lives disrupted with drugs and alcohol, family violence, poverty, and criminalisation and a policing system which is rife with racial profiling, a justice system which is not geared to empathy and constructively dealing with the deprivation caused through the stolen generation and in more recent times children forced into foster care, all well intentioned, but ultimately destoying the sense of self worth, destroying the connection to a culture, a silencing of the songlines.
Read Archie Roach’s story, ‘Tell me why’, he was fostered/adopted into a caring Christian home, but caught up with other Aboriginals with similar dislocations and fell into a world of trouble and grief. His music tell so much of his story, the struggles with drugs and alcohol, the criminalisation of Aboriginality. The struggle with finding who he really was.
Another story that rings so true in that difference of culture, the dispossession of Aboriginal lands and with it the break from the songlines which tied them intrinsically to their lands is well explained ‘Corroboree or War Party: the last dance of the Wangaratta Pangarang’ by Wendy Mitchell. A book in two parts, history through white eyes and that same history from Aboriginal oral history telling by Freddie Dowling in ‘No more the valley rings with Koorie laughter’.
Or the story of an Aboriginal man imprisoned on Rottnest Island in the late 1890s for killing a sheep. He was about to spear a kangaroo when a shot rang out and a white settler took the kangaroo home for dinner. So the Aboriginal man speared the sheep, but that was considered stealing.
Surely, in dealing with Aboriginal youth crime there must be a better way. Speaking with an Aboriginal elder, a former AFL player and now a social worker, I am told of a programme that takes kids to ‘country’, to be taught about their culture, their origins, their songlines, to try to give back a sense of who they are, to initiate them into ‘manhood’, to give them a sense of being.
A better way will not only save resources being spent on more prisons but will prepare so many young Aboriginal people a sense of self worth, a sense of who they are and lead them into a ‘productive’ life.
There must be abetter way.
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“… a programme that takes kids to ‘country’, to be taught about their culture, their origins, their songlines, to try to give back a sense of who they are, to initiate them into ‘manhood’, to give them a sense of being.”
I have been involved in such work, though not with Indigenous youth, and have seen its results. But if that’s the only string to our bow we are doing only half of the job. Kids I took on school camps acquired aspirations that were immediately dashed when they returned to sitting in rows in classrooms. Indigenous youth must experience an ever greater disappointment when they resume life among whitefellas who insist that blackfellas will always bee the problem until they’re more like us. It’s great that Indigenous youth are embracing change but how often do we whitefellas ask: What about us!?
Paul, Thank you for your response/
I certainly do not have, nor do I claim to have the answers, but,we need to ask ‘is there a better way?’ often, and be prepared to deal individually with offenders, look at their social circles, family connects, and many other things..Take a look at the way the prison and justice systems have changed in places such as The Netherlands. Understand why lock ’em up and throw away the key os not a good solution.
The obvious problem with songlines, that is always ignored by those who exaggerate their ritual worth as a navigational tool, is that if you don’t get the tempo exactly right you won’t end up where you were hoping to arrive. Keeping time at a constant rate in primitive ages was extremely difficult. Inevitably the songs speed up or slow down and attempts to reproduce them can vary wildly in duration. Even using your pulse to measure time like Galileo when he timed the swinging of a pendulum is unreliable if your heart rate isn’t constant, which it wouldn’t be over any journey that varies in physical effort. So teaching others how to get the timing of songlines exactly right is pretty much impossible.
Nowadays when we try to look at the Pleiades (the seven sisters, also known as the jewel box) with all the light pollution of modern cities we are lucky if we can see more than a blur, let alone see the individual stars, of which there are more than seven. Every primitive culture capable of observing them (rain forest peoples would have difficulties) throughout the world’s history had their own particular legends about the origins of these stars. Of course none of them were true, but they do indicate a common world wide human interest in making up stories to explain the unknown in order to cope with their conditions of profound ignorance.
I suppose what I’m trying to say is that it is surely better to encourage critical scientific knowledge than to promote uncritical cultural ignorance as if it was just as worthy as genuine knowledge. Ignorance isn’t much of a legacy to pass on to younger generations so it should come as no surprise if they lack interest in it.