'Songlines, also known as Tjukurpa, Dreaming tracks, creation law, are the sung pathways of First Australian ancestors. These invisible tracks were created by the totems, or ancestral beings, of Aboriginal creation myths as they wandered across the continent naming everything they saw and leaving a trail of words and musical notes in their wake. Songlines chart critical sites and resources, linking stories to landscape: they are both map and compass. They provide practical signposts such as the location of rivers and caves – survival knowledge essential to desert life – but also describe the origins of the universe as well as moral codes and their consequences. For generations, the songs allowed First Australians to re-enact ancestral exploits on the sites where they occurred – not in a place called Australia but ‘Country’, a term that encompasses the spiritual connections of specific peoples to land, water, memory, custom and law, and which links hundreds of ancient languages. As access to these sites has diminished, painting, along with other artforms, has become an important means of preserving the Indigenous knowledge bound up in songlines.'
(Introduction)
