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Songline
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==Descriptions and definitions== [[Anthropologist]] Robert Tonkinson described [[Martu people|Mardu]] songlines in his 1978 monograph ''The Mardudjara Aborigines - Living The Dream In Australia's Desert''. {{blockquote| ''Songlines'' Singing is an essential element in most Mardudjara ritual performances because the songline follows in most cases the direction of travel of the beings concerned and highlights cryptically their notable as well as mundane activities. Most songs, then, have a geographical as well as mythical referent, so by learning the songline men become familiar with literally thousands of sites even though they have never visited them; all become part of their cognitive map of the desert world.<ref>Tonkinson 1978:104</ref>}} In his 1987 book ''[[The Songlines]]'', British novelist and travel writer [[Bruce Chatwin]] describes the songlines as: {{blockquote| ... the labyrinth of invisible pathways which meander all over Australia and are known to Europeans as "Dreaming-tracks" or "Songlines"; to the Aboriginals as the "Footprints of the Ancestors" or the "Way of the Lore". Aboriginal Creation myths tell of the legendary totemic being who wandered over the continent in the Dreamtime, singing out the name of everything that crossed their path - birds, animals, plants, rocks, waterholes - and so singing the world into existence.<ref name="Chatwin2012">{{citation|last=Chatwin|first=Bruce|author-link=Bruce Chatwin|title=The Songlines|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=7oy_WJFp2REC&pg=PA2|access-date=29 July 2016|year=2012|publisher=Random House|isbn=978-1-4481-1302-6|page=2}}</ref> }} Margo Ngawa Neale, senior Indigenous art and history curator at the [[National Museum of Australia]], says:<ref>{{cite web | last=Boltje | first=Stephanie | title=and they store knowledge that's critical to survival | website=[[ABC News (Australia)|ABC News]] | date=4 October 2023 | url=https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-04/significance-connection-to-country-songlines-indigenous-culture/102925228 | access-date=30 April 2024}}</ref>{{blockquote|Songlines can be visualised as corridors or pathways of knowledge that crisscross the entire continent, sky and water. Songlines, sometimes referred to as dreaming tracks, link sites and hold stories, known as story places, which are read into the natural features of the land. These sites of significance, formed by ancestral beings, are like libraries, storing critical knowledge for survival. The stories at significant sites contain knowledge that instruct on social behaviour, gender relations or where water or food can be sourced.}}
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