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Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters
Created under the guidance of cultural custodians, traditional owners and artists, Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters explores the history and meaning of the Dreaming or creation tracks that crisscross the Australian continent, of which the Seven Sisters songlines are amongst the most extensive. Through artworks, stories and in-depth analysis, this book provides an important resource for those interested in knowing more about these complex pathways of spiritual, ecological, economic, cultural and ontological knowledge - the stories ‘written in the land’
255 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
November 23, 2017
Amazing
Massive book. Both in content and physical size
I won't pretend I have read it all. But I have managed a good overview. I hope to get to Canberra to see the exhibition while open and will purchase my own copy as a reference for life
There is so much wisdom contained within. You can absorb the wisdom just by spending time sitting with and gazing into the images. And you can absorb more by reading the essays, bios and stories.
Massive book. Both in content and physical size
I won't pretend I have read it all. But I have managed a good overview. I hope to get to Canberra to see the exhibition while open and will purchase my own copy as a reference for life
There is so much wisdom contained within. You can absorb the wisdom just by spending time sitting with and gazing into the images. And you can absorb more by reading the essays, bios and stories.
January 9, 2022
Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters is at heart an archival project, initiated by aboriginal people from four different language groups and land areas in the Western Desert of central Australia. Working with staff and technicians at the Australian National University and the National Museum of Australia, they produced the materials -- paintings, performances, photos, video and sound recording that make up the exhibition with the stated intention of preserving the songlines, or dreamtime or more often, “the dreaming” (the advantages and disadvantages of the term “songlines, popularized through Bruce Chatwin’s novel The Songlines from 1987, are examined in one of the catalogue essays.). Stated differently, this is an effort to admit others, strangers as well as the younger members of their own groups, into the shared cognitive state that make them who they are. More specifically, it is to show others how they are integrated with a particular place -- with the unique features of land, water, plants, animals and sky. The word has no simple English equivalent; “stories” seems like the broadest, more flexible option. But you might say the whole project, exhibition and catalogue, are concerned with adequately translating of this word. In this catalogue, it’s Jukurrpa or Tjukurpa -- depending on the language spoken in the place the events took place. Only the stories, as we are able to “hear” them in paintings or texts or photographs or videos, are also songs, histories, maps, laws, topographies, gazetteers, textbooks and more.
I found the exhibition both absorbing and in some ways frustrating. Something -- a lot, actually -- wasn’t and isn’t clear to me. It seemed impossible to get a comprehensive, overall “picture”. Everywhere, there are episodes in the same wild tale, a rude, sexually-obsessed man in pursuit of a group of seven women, presumably sisters. The man changes shape, even name. He can detach his penis and send it ahead to do his bidding, even underground if that seems to be advantageous for him under the circumstances. Yurla, or Wati Nyiri -- again depending on the language -- is violent, manipulative -- effectively a clever and relentless rapist. The sisters evade him again and again, dismissive, taunting, even more manipulative than he is sometimes. Eventually, however, he changes himself into a snake, and the sisters eat him without knowing the identity of the meat: they die in one sense, but in another are transformed into the constellation Pleiades; the man seems to turn into Orion -- it’s not very clear. Is this all in the past or present? How can such a tale be foundational, binding a society together, tying everyday events in everyday lives to all of time and space? How do thousands of small confrontations, attacks, chases, near-misses, integrate land to people? Are we looking back on a state of mind that has passed, or are we in the present? How does the story begin?
The catalogue helps a great deal, and even offers some partial, oblique answers to such questions. It adapts an exceptional kind of exhibition -- a thoroughly participatory project -- to the demands of pages and print, making space for conversations as well as more conventional texts, putting large amounts of detail -- especially about individual contributor-artists -- in order, but not presuming to finally “explain” anything. Best of all, the catalogue shares stories of contemporary people who know the seven sisters from direct experience, who live with Jukurrpa -- the dreaming. There’s a story told by a group of Martu women, for example -- bound together in various kinds of traditional relationships, including family -- who encounter some “whitefellas” in Toyotas who trick and rob them. Unsurprisingly, they identify the men with Wati Nyiri and themselves with the seven sisters. In one of the catalogue essays, contributing artist Kim Mahood helpfully “reads” the situation of human beings surviving -- precariously -- in in the vast Western desert through the lens of the Seven Sisters stories. The desert, she writes, is a land “seething with tension.” With threats at every turn, it demands close attention and quick, decisive responses.
Songlines invites its viewers and readers into the cognitive world of a group of aboriginal people whose culture had been, until quite recently, primarily oral. The exhibition has come about because a substantial group of them -- elders, responsible for future generations -- recognized that their culture is no longer reproducing itself. Children no longer hear words and phrases, sounds, and dances repeated continually and learn them by heart, no longer see themselves needing the knowledge of the land embedded in the words, about its plants, animals, weather and water. Having long since quietly accepted a vast loss of a culture as it once was, the elders turned to “whitefellas,” specifically to their preservation technology, as it informs Australian museum-archive-university culture. We’re far more familiar with seeing an archival framework imposed on oral, or formerly oral communities; this is collaborative, different, and more hopeful.
But the identities of the oral and literate are neither tidy nor particularly stable. Painting on fixed cave walls -- and the spectacular paintings at Walinynga feature prominently in video images in the exhibition -- reflect the understandings of an oral culture; painting on canvases -- mobile surfaces of the kind that constitute a very significant proportion of Songlines, are made and seen in an entirely different framework, deeply connected to literate practices of exhibition and reproduction. The elders speak fluently on camera, often in English, and this with an ease that suggests they are no strangers to television. We have inherited the terms orality and literacy from the priest and scholar Walter J. Ong (1912-2003) and we may be too ready to understand them as simple opposites, although he did not. It’s probably fairer to propose that although “pure orality” (Ong’s term) hardly exists any more anywhere in the worlds, all of us now live in the state of communication he called secondary orality, exposed frequently to sound transmitted on radio and television, and more or less aware that those technologies depend utterly on text, numbers, hierarchical thinking -- on the legacy of writing. Will the exhibition succeed, in the sense of introducing novices to the Tjukurpa, cultivating an appreciation, interest, curiosity about and respect for a very effective, very durable way of being human?
I saw the exhibition in Plymouth, its first stop after opening to large and enthusiastic audiences in Australia. After it leaves England this month --January 2022 -- it will travel on to France, Germany, and the US. By all means see it if you possibly can. And by all means DO get a catalogue!
I found the exhibition both absorbing and in some ways frustrating. Something -- a lot, actually -- wasn’t and isn’t clear to me. It seemed impossible to get a comprehensive, overall “picture”. Everywhere, there are episodes in the same wild tale, a rude, sexually-obsessed man in pursuit of a group of seven women, presumably sisters. The man changes shape, even name. He can detach his penis and send it ahead to do his bidding, even underground if that seems to be advantageous for him under the circumstances. Yurla, or Wati Nyiri -- again depending on the language -- is violent, manipulative -- effectively a clever and relentless rapist. The sisters evade him again and again, dismissive, taunting, even more manipulative than he is sometimes. Eventually, however, he changes himself into a snake, and the sisters eat him without knowing the identity of the meat: they die in one sense, but in another are transformed into the constellation Pleiades; the man seems to turn into Orion -- it’s not very clear. Is this all in the past or present? How can such a tale be foundational, binding a society together, tying everyday events in everyday lives to all of time and space? How do thousands of small confrontations, attacks, chases, near-misses, integrate land to people? Are we looking back on a state of mind that has passed, or are we in the present? How does the story begin?
The catalogue helps a great deal, and even offers some partial, oblique answers to such questions. It adapts an exceptional kind of exhibition -- a thoroughly participatory project -- to the demands of pages and print, making space for conversations as well as more conventional texts, putting large amounts of detail -- especially about individual contributor-artists -- in order, but not presuming to finally “explain” anything. Best of all, the catalogue shares stories of contemporary people who know the seven sisters from direct experience, who live with Jukurrpa -- the dreaming. There’s a story told by a group of Martu women, for example -- bound together in various kinds of traditional relationships, including family -- who encounter some “whitefellas” in Toyotas who trick and rob them. Unsurprisingly, they identify the men with Wati Nyiri and themselves with the seven sisters. In one of the catalogue essays, contributing artist Kim Mahood helpfully “reads” the situation of human beings surviving -- precariously -- in in the vast Western desert through the lens of the Seven Sisters stories. The desert, she writes, is a land “seething with tension.” With threats at every turn, it demands close attention and quick, decisive responses.
Songlines invites its viewers and readers into the cognitive world of a group of aboriginal people whose culture had been, until quite recently, primarily oral. The exhibition has come about because a substantial group of them -- elders, responsible for future generations -- recognized that their culture is no longer reproducing itself. Children no longer hear words and phrases, sounds, and dances repeated continually and learn them by heart, no longer see themselves needing the knowledge of the land embedded in the words, about its plants, animals, weather and water. Having long since quietly accepted a vast loss of a culture as it once was, the elders turned to “whitefellas,” specifically to their preservation technology, as it informs Australian museum-archive-university culture. We’re far more familiar with seeing an archival framework imposed on oral, or formerly oral communities; this is collaborative, different, and more hopeful.
But the identities of the oral and literate are neither tidy nor particularly stable. Painting on fixed cave walls -- and the spectacular paintings at Walinynga feature prominently in video images in the exhibition -- reflect the understandings of an oral culture; painting on canvases -- mobile surfaces of the kind that constitute a very significant proportion of Songlines, are made and seen in an entirely different framework, deeply connected to literate practices of exhibition and reproduction. The elders speak fluently on camera, often in English, and this with an ease that suggests they are no strangers to television. We have inherited the terms orality and literacy from the priest and scholar Walter J. Ong (1912-2003) and we may be too ready to understand them as simple opposites, although he did not. It’s probably fairer to propose that although “pure orality” (Ong’s term) hardly exists any more anywhere in the worlds, all of us now live in the state of communication he called secondary orality, exposed frequently to sound transmitted on radio and television, and more or less aware that those technologies depend utterly on text, numbers, hierarchical thinking -- on the legacy of writing. Will the exhibition succeed, in the sense of introducing novices to the Tjukurpa, cultivating an appreciation, interest, curiosity about and respect for a very effective, very durable way of being human?
I saw the exhibition in Plymouth, its first stop after opening to large and enthusiastic audiences in Australia. After it leaves England this month --January 2022 -- it will travel on to France, Germany, and the US. By all means see it if you possibly can. And by all means DO get a catalogue!
September 28, 2025
This was a very compelling read. The essays themselves which make up the text are very uneven, sometimes dragging, other times asserting, but it sometimes feels they can't help themselves but be insightful and loving. In large part this is because the subject matter is so different from how contemporary Western society would handle such a story. Sisters, pursued by an obsessed would-be and will-be rapist, navigating a land that literally "seethes and ripples with sexual desire", handling themselves and their situation with wit, cheek and fear. Several essayists really want to impress on you how much you will not be able to understand, how much is hidden from you, but that isn't really clear until you read the full text and spend time with the paintings. And then you finally get a sense of the presence beneath the surface. I wish I got to see the exhibition when it was on. An insert in my edition between pages 52 and 53 was a highlight, which overlays paintings with what elements are signifying, making it very clear how viewing the works as abstract is simple naivete. I couldn't quite piece together how people in different lands view the movement across Australia, except the idea that the pursuit started in Roebourne.
December 27, 2017
My thoughts about this beautiful book are going to be inadequate because it’s due back at the library before I have time to read it properly, but I still think it’s worthwhile drawing attention to Songlines, Tracking the Seven Sisters, edited by Adjunct Professor Margo Neale from the Australian National University and written in collaboration with Aboriginal knowledge holders from Martu country and Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara (APY) and Ngaanyatjarra lands. Neale is well-placed for this complex role because she is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Historical Research, and Senior Curator and Principal Advisor to the Director (Indigenous) of the National Museum of Australia.
Like other books from remote Indigenous communities that I have come across, Songlines, Tracking the Seven Sisters is produced in a collaborative way but is distinguished by having been conceived not from a museum or university within a Western paradigm but derives from a concern of Indigenous people themselves, that knowledge is being lost as old people pass away and young ones are distracted by modern technologies. As Neale says in the Introduction, ‘Alive with the Dreaming’, elders knew that they must use Western ways of holding the knowledge, waiting for some time in the future, after the elders had passed on and [the young people] were ready to learn.
My first understandings about the term ‘songlines’ was from the English author Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines because I wanted to include the concept in what I was teaching about Australian exploration. I had searched without success for an Indigenous explanation among my resources at school (The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture and Australian Dreaming, 40,000 Years of Aboriginal History). These were books that Margo Neale herself had recommended to participants in the Summer School for History that I had attended in 2008, but useful as they were for many things as we introduced Aboriginal Perspectives into the study of space, nutrition and safety round the home, I retired from teaching still keen to find an Indigenous explanation of the concept of songlines or Tjukurpa. So I was delighted when I stumbled across Songlines, Tracking the Seven Sisters and I asked my library to get a copy for me.
Songlines, Tracking the Seven Sisters was published to accompany an exhibition currently on at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, but it is not the usual exhibition where the exhibits are sourced from art galleries and other museums.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/12/27/s...
Like other books from remote Indigenous communities that I have come across, Songlines, Tracking the Seven Sisters is produced in a collaborative way but is distinguished by having been conceived not from a museum or university within a Western paradigm but derives from a concern of Indigenous people themselves, that knowledge is being lost as old people pass away and young ones are distracted by modern technologies. As Neale says in the Introduction, ‘Alive with the Dreaming’, elders knew that they must use Western ways of holding the knowledge, waiting for some time in the future, after the elders had passed on and [the young people] were ready to learn.
My first understandings about the term ‘songlines’ was from the English author Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines because I wanted to include the concept in what I was teaching about Australian exploration. I had searched without success for an Indigenous explanation among my resources at school (The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture and Australian Dreaming, 40,000 Years of Aboriginal History). These were books that Margo Neale herself had recommended to participants in the Summer School for History that I had attended in 2008, but useful as they were for many things as we introduced Aboriginal Perspectives into the study of space, nutrition and safety round the home, I retired from teaching still keen to find an Indigenous explanation of the concept of songlines or Tjukurpa. So I was delighted when I stumbled across Songlines, Tracking the Seven Sisters and I asked my library to get a copy for me.
Songlines, Tracking the Seven Sisters was published to accompany an exhibition currently on at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, but it is not the usual exhibition where the exhibits are sourced from art galleries and other museums.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/12/27/s...
February 9, 2020
Beautiful art but weird colonial anthropological accompanying essays by non-Indigenous art historians (?) which really detract from the overall product. Plenty of Indigenous artists or academics who could have been commissioned to provide commentary so strange but not unsurprising decision in the deeply colonial Australian context
June 11, 2018
Beautiful book which deserves to be savoured one image at a time. Wish I could have seen the exhibition that other reviewers mentioned.
I feel inadequate to describe this book properly, but for anyone interested in indigenous art, culture, history, mythology and women’s stories this is a must-see book.
I feel inadequate to describe this book properly, but for anyone interested in indigenous art, culture, history, mythology and women’s stories this is a must-see book.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews