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Like oral cultures around the world, Indigenous Australians use cues from the landscape to recall and pass on important knowledge, cultural values and wisdom. Lynne Malcolm and Olivia Willis discover how these songlines operate as a potent form of cultural memory.

Indigenous Australians have the longest continuous cultural history of any group of people on Earth.

To this day, their history is preserved and passed down through intricate song, dance, art and stories of the Dreamtime.

Because of Aboriginal culture, we have these continuing stories to our country that other countries don't have.

Woven into this history is the oral tradition of songlines—an ancient memory code used by indigenous cultures around the world.

'Songlines and Dreamings are often held in physical parts of the country, and that assists us to maintain our continuing culture,' says Karen Adams, associate professor in medicine and health sciences at Monash University and Wiradjuri woman.

'Stories are handed down in families that relate to country,' Adams says, 'and often those stories are about social law.'

What are songlines?

Songlines trace the journeys of ancestral spirits as they created the land, animals and lore.

Integral to Aboriginal spirituality, songlines are deeply tied to the Australian landscape and provide important knowledge, cultural values and wisdom to Indigenous people.

'They can be about creation stories, and they can be contemporary stories as well,' says Adams.

'It's quite complex, but those land markers are very, very important, hence the importance of land claims and acknowledgement of traditional owners.'

Using songlines, Indigenous Australians have acquired an encyclopedic memory of the thousands of species of plants and animals across Australia.

'They wouldn't have survived if they didn't have all this practical knowledge and handed down generation after generation,' says Monash University researcher Lynne Kelly.

Read more: Stories of Indigenous recovery

Kelly has collaborated with Indigenous Australian people to gain an insight into their oral tradition and memory, and its deep connections to the landscape.

'Songlines are known as navigational tracks, in that the elders or the trained Indigenous people will sing the landscape and therefore be able to move from location to location through it, and teach each other,' says Kelly.

'At every location, each sacred site within that sung track, they perform rituals. Those rituals are repeated songs, and those songs encode the information.'

According to Kelly, research has shown that up to 70 per cent of Indigenous songs is knowledge about animals, plants and seasonality—'the sort of information you need to survive and know that environment backwards'.

'They are singing the information in songs that tell stories because song, story, mythology, is so much more memorable than a list of facts.

'By describing a plant and giving it characteristics and behaviour, you're actually making the information much more memorable.'

The role of songlines in memory

In 2014, the Nobel Prize for Medicine established how closely memory and spatial awareness are intertwined in the hippocampus. The finding confirmed the pairing of place and memory seen in many of the world's indigenous cultures.

'Songlines link positions in landscape. Each location in the landscape acts as a memory aid to a particular part of the information system, so the knowledge is literally grounded in the landscape,' says Kelly.

The technique is reinforced by the use of portable devices, such as message sticks.

'Using these devices, and the landscape, and song and dance and story and mythology—that combination is an extraordinarily powerful memory technique that reinforces itself,' Kelly says.

Kelly says evidence has emerged of a cultural knowledge of landscape changes dating back 7,000 years.

'The mechanisms are so robust that things like formation of islands around the coast of Australia and sea level rises are accurately recorded in [the] oral tradition,' she says.

The practical uses of the memory code

Australia is home to an extensive network of traditional songlines, some of which traverse hundreds of kilometres through lands of many different Indigenous peoples.

Songlines offer rich explanations of land formations, plant remedies and animal behaviour. Before Indigenous hunters head out, they will perform rituals and repeated acts to improve the success of their hunt.

'If they are hunting kangaroos, for example, dancers will demonstrate the way the ears move if they have detected movement. That sort of information is hugely helpful to get close enough in order to hunt a kangaroo.'

Though deeply tied to the landscape, Kelly has discovered how memory codes like songlines can be used in everyday life.

Like many oral cultures, Kelly used the environment around her to create her own songline, through it, she's been able to memorise all 242 countries by population order.

'I've got Brazil linked to a window in my study. I always know Brazil is number five,' says Kelly.

'I was blessed with a terrible memory, and now I can memorise all this stuff, but it's so much fun and so vivid… I'll just create stories.'

The importance of caring for songlines

Given the significance of the Australian landscape to Indigenous people's cultural heritage, Karen Adams says it's important the land is cared for and respected.

'A lot of the ceremonies and rituals and continuing stories reinforce belonging and social connection and strength of identity and who you are, your confidence and how you travel in the world, and that has an enormous impact on mental health,' she says.

Lynne Kelly agrees, and says the 'invigorated' Australian landscape is an encyclopedia 'embedded' with Aboriginal history, culture and knowledge.

'I had no concept of the depth of knowledge, the absolutely critical nature of the songs and stories, and in particular the landscape, and the bonds between people,' she says.

'The thought now of what the colonisers did to Indigenous people is just horrendous.'

Adams says Australia's long Indigenous history is something all Australians should 'take a great deal of pride in'.

'Because of Aboriginal culture, we have these continuing stories to our country that other countries actually don't have. And I think that that's something to be really proud about.'

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