Songlines.
The best-known connection between footfall, knowledge and
memory is the Aboriginal Australian vision of the Songlines. According to this
cosmogony, the world was created in an epoch known as the Dreamtime, when the
Ancestors emerged to find the earth a black, flat, featureless terrain. They
began to walk out across this non-place, and as they walked they broke through
the crust of the earth and released the sleeping life beneath it, so that the
landscape sprang up into being with each pace. As Bruce Chatwin explained in
his flawed but influential account, ‘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'. Depending on where they fell, these
foot-notes became linked with particular features of the landscape. Thus the
world was covered by ‘Dreaming-tracks’ that ‘lay over the land as “ways” of
communication’, each track having its corresponding Song. To sing out
was–-and still is, just about, for the Songs survive, though more and more of
them slip away with each generation–-therefore to find one’s way, and
storytelling was indivisible from wayfaring.
Robert MacFarlane
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