The ability of music to communicate, sustain knowledge and support feelings of affiliation is widely acknowledged. Its ubiquity and diversity worldwide demonstrate its potential to help humanity adapt and thrive in different times and places. Nowhere is this more evident than in Australia, home to the most long-standing, landscape-based performance traditions in the world. Aboriginal songs connect people, language, knowledge and country – that ‘nourishing terrain’ that is alive and intertwined with Aboriginal identities and knowledge systems.
In an effort to distil the importance of song and interconnected practices, the Garma Statement on Indigenous Music and Performance states:
Songs, dances and ceremonial performances form the core of Yolŋu and other Indigenous cultures in Australia. It is through song, dance and associated ceremony that Indigenous people sustain their cultures and maintain the law and a sense of self within the world.
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One of the authors of this chapter recently visited an important river system in Esperance, Western Australia, with his uncle, a senior Nyungar artist. This uncle had not been to that significant place before and revealed that he felt a little uneasy about going there. On arrival, after the group got out of the car, the author and his aunty, a local traditional owner, sang a special Nyungar song belonging to that place. At that moment, the uncle knew it was OK for him to be there.
Describing an ‘Indigenous way of knowing’, Aaniiih-Gros Ventre scholar Joseph P Gone states, ‘You have questions, you want answers, you go through a process to figure out how to get an answer to that question.’ While some people may consult the Bureau of Meteorology or pay close attention to warning signs for poisonous snakes and plants, for many Aboriginal people, one’s safety in a place can be gauged through song. This understanding is not just based on the words and tune of the song itself, but the web of meaning conferred by the singer’s relationship with the place and observation of how the natural world – the place itself – reacts to the singing. The sceptic might dismiss this kind of knowledge as intuition or faith, but it has persisted for many generations and has proved to be infallible enough for Aboriginal people to rely on. As the Yindjibarndi and Ngarluma cultural history from the Pilbara attests, ‘Know the song, know the Country’. Aboriginal logic suggests that if a person knows and shares the songs of a place, those songs will hold them safely in that place.
Acceptance of this ‘way of knowing’ is widespread across Australia. In Aboriginal contexts, knowledge of an area’s songs can be equivalent to a title deed for the land and, in recent decades, Australian courts have considered songs as evidence in native title cases. Referring to the kujika song cycles from the Gulf of Carpentaria, senior Yanyuwa man Dinny McDinny explains,
Whitefella got that piece of paper – might be lease or something like that – but Yanyuwa and Garrwa mob they got to have kujika. When whitefella ask them kids how you know this country belongs to you, they can say we got the kujika. Kujika, you know, like that piece of paper.
More than just communicating concepts of ownership, landscape-based song genres like kujika have deep and rich histories in country.
Read: (Dis)connected to Country: mapping the intersections of place, identity and family
Created by ancestor beings as they traversed the land, kujika are often restricted in accordance with Yanyuwa law. Mussolini Harvey, a senior Yanyuwa man, explains:
This Law is our ceremonies, our songs, our stories; all of these things come from the Dreaming… The Law was made by the Dreamings many, many years ago and given to our ancestors and they gave it to us … The Dreamings were the first to dance our ceremonies and sing our songs. Some of these songs are dangerous, they are secret and sacred, women and children are not allowed to see them. Others are not secret, everyone can look at them, but they are still sacred… The Dreamings named all of the country and the sea as they travelled, they named everything that they saw. The Dreamings gave us our songs. These songs are sacred and we call them kujika. These songs tell the story of the Dreaming as they travelled over the country, everything the Dreaming did is in the songs… These songs are like maps, they tell us about the country, they are maps which we carry in our heads.
As Harvey explains, songs sustain centuries-old knowledge of landscapes. Bruce Chatwin’s fiction-inflected 1987 publication widely popularised the oft-cited term ‘songlines’, which he refers to as a ‘labyrinth of invisible pathways’ storied, sung and traversed across Australia. So-called songlines may be considered landscape-based songs, performances or ceremonies that can journey from one geographical point to another, or circle around to meet or focus on a single landmark. More than an aural map, landscape-based songs celebrate the unique features of relevant country. They educate people about sites, natural phenomena, histories of place and Aboriginal law more generally. As Nyikina, Warrwa and Wangkumara Barkindji woman Marlikka Perdrisa stated at the 2021 AIATSIS Summit, “We care for country by keeping country company – we sing to it.” Songs are sung as part of one’s responsibility to help nurture country.
Dramatic social changes in Aboriginal communities that began with Australia’s colonisation have resulted in ever fewer opportunities for the performance of landscape-based Aboriginal songs, and have consequently limited the ability for each new generation to learn those songs. Senior Tiwi woman Lenie Tipiloura shares her concern that “if all the old songs are lost, then we don’t remember who we are”. Asked about differences between past and present song performances at Yuendumu in central Australia, senior Warlpiri man Rex Japanangka Granites stated that “country doesn’t change”, confirming his understanding that even if lost from the minds of contemporary people, the stories, performance practices and knowledge will always be held in the country.
Professor Irene Watson’s poignant statement that “the natural world is still singing even though the greater part of humanity has disconnected itself from song” conveys a similar optimism that country itself holds understandings. In response to immense pressure to move away from homelands and conform to settler-colonial expectations, Aboriginal people have innovated new genres, songs and ceremonies, mobilising song to nurture connection and sustain knowledge of country.
This is an edited extract from Clint Bracknell and Sally Treloyn’s chapter ‘Singing and Knowing’ in Indigenous Knowledge, co-edited by Marcia Langton, Aaron Corn and Samuel Curkpatrick, and published by Melbourne University Publishing.
