What are Songlines - Aboriginal Knowledge, Country and Art

Songlines are one of the most extraordinary achievements of human culture - an invisible network of pathways that crisscross the entire Australian continent, encoding thousands of years of knowledge about country, law, navigation, ceremony and survival. They are the foundation on which much Aboriginal art is built.

What is a songline?

A songline - also known as a dreaming track - marks the route travelled by an ancestral being during the Dreaming. As these ancestors moved across the land, they sang the world into existence, naming every feature they passed - every waterhole, rock formation, animal, plant and landmark. Their songs created the landscape. The route they travelled became a songline.

As Margo Neale, senior Indigenous art and history curator at the National Museum of Australia, describes it: songlines can be visualised as corridors or pathways of knowledge that crisscross the entire continent, sky and water. They link significant sites and hold stories that are read into the natural features of the land. Those sites are like libraries, storing critical knowledge for survival.

A knowledgeable person can navigate vast distances across Australia by singing the songs in the correct sequence. The songs describe the landscape - its waterholes, landmarks and features - in the order in which they appear along the route. By singing the words, a traveller could find their way across hundreds of kilometres of desert, even through country they had never physically visited.

More than a map

To describe songlines simply as a navigation system is to vastly understate what they are. A songline also defines a group of people - their identity, their country, their law, their obligations and their ceremonies. It connects neighbouring language groups to one another, creating a continent-wide network of shared knowledge, relationship and responsibility.

Songlines contain knowledge about which foods are safe to eat, where water can be found in different seasons, the boundaries of each community's country, and how to behave respectfully when travelling through the country of neighbouring groups. They encode social law - the rules governing marriage, kinship, ceremony and cultural obligation.

According to the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), songlines have been a central feature of First Nations cultures for tens of thousands of years. Some songlines have been found to encode knowledge of landscapes that have been underwater for more than 7,000 years - suggesting the songs themselves may be among the oldest continuously transmitted knowledge systems on earth.

How songlines work across country

Australia contains an extensive network of songlines, some spanning only a few kilometres and others traversing thousands. One songline stretches 3,500km connecting the central desert region with the eastern coast of Australia. Another runs from Port Augusta to Arnhem Land.

Where a songline passes through the country of different language groups, each group holds their own section. They sing their section in their own language. The next group picks up the song in their language at the boundary of their country. In this way, a single story can travel across the entire continent, held in sections by dozens of different communities, each custodian of their own verse.

This is why neighbouring Aboriginal language groups are so deeply connected - not just by proximity, but by shared participation in the same song cycles that weave and criss-cross across their countries.

Songlines and Aboriginal art

The modern Aboriginal painting movement is in many ways a visual expression of songlines. When artists paint their country - its waterholes, sacred sites, ancestral journeys, plant and animal life - they are painting the songlines that belong to them. The symbols in a painting encode the same knowledge that was traditionally carried in song, dance and ceremony.

As writer and art dealer David Wroth has noted, songlines underpin the whole of Aboriginal culture. The significant cultural knowledge that belongs to people comes from their participation in the songlines of their country. Those same stories are the family stories and clan stories that become part of what artists paint.

A concentric circle in a painting may represent a waterhole, a campsite, a sacred site or a point along a songline. A line of dots may trace an ancestral journey. The same symbol can carry multiple meanings simultaneously, readable at different levels depending on the viewer's knowledge and cultural standing. Some meanings are shared with the world. Others are restricted to those with the appropriate ceremonial standing to receive them.

Songlines in the paintings of Art by Farquhar

Every painting in the Art by Farquhar collection carries a songline. Artists from Willowra, Yuendumu and the Central Desert paint the Jukurrpa of their country - Water Dreaming, Seven Sisters, Sand Dunes, Fire Dreaming - each one a section of a songline that has been passed down through their family for generations. Artists from the APY Lands paint the Tjukurpa of their country - the Pantu salt lakes, the Piltati ranges, the Seven Sisters as she travels through Anangu country.

When you buy an original Aboriginal painting, you are acquiring a work that carries one of the oldest continuously transmitted knowledge systems on earth. Browse the collection at farquhar.art/collections or contact us at sales@farquhar.art.