The term Songlines is widely recognised but for non-Indigenous Australians grasping the actually concept is more elusive. Hats off then to the National Museum of Australia in Canberra for its imaginative effort to bridge the gap of cultural enlightenment by taking the visitor on a colourful, multi-media Indigenous cultural journey through space and time across the continent and beyond.
Woven versions of the Seven Sisters created by Indigenous women.
Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters focuses on sections of just five songlines, a mere handful of the thousands that track across Australia telling the Indigenous creation story. Those stories could be described as parables imparting traditional laws and creation interpretations, the battle between good and evil. The seven sisters are chased across the land by the lustful, shape-shifting sorcerer Wati Nyiru. He can become a tree, or a serpant, always trying to tempt and confound the sisters as they flee across the land, each songline having a different version.
The songline left by the sisters in their flight across country, employing all the tricks they know, such as flying, to elude Wari Nyiru creates the features of the land – boulders, hills, trees and waterholes. Eventually they fly into the heavens where they merge with the Orion constellation and Pleiades star cluster.
Ceramic tributes to the songlines.
The standout feature of the exhibition was the amazing six-metre digital dome room wherein visitors could lie back and watch a state-of-the-art digital, high-res experience including the transit of Pleiades and the Orion constellation, the Seven Sisters rock art from Cave Hill in South Australia and vision of the sisters flying into the night sky. Given the scientific revelation that we humans all carry elements from the Big Bang within us, I saw the elegance of this songline.
