The Memory Code: The traditional Aboriginal memory technique that unlocks the secrets of Stonehenge, Easter Island and ancient monuments the world over

The map helps me to remember the song. The song recalls the map. It is no longer clear which dominates; they work together. Australian Aboriginal paintings are so often of their landscape; the designs recall the songs while the songs recall the landscape and the designs that represent it.

The songlines discussed here and the range of portable devices I will describe all meld naturally into a system which is far more complex to describe than it is to use. I don’t understand why I am never confused by drawing information from a whole range of memory spaces, but I am not. After a few years of adding data and commentary, stories and myt

At that moment I asked myself, what would a mobile culture do about maintaining their songlines, their memory trails, their set of sacred memory locations across the landscape when they settled down? They could not afford to lose the knowledge but they were no longer travelling the wider landscape. It seemed immediately obvious that a circle of sto

I soon understood why indigenous people will make sand paintings or draw in the earth, arrange leaves or paint on bark only to throw their creation away. The process is powerful and rewarding, intellectually and emotionally, and really enhances memorability of the knowledge.

Curiosity and the desire for knowledge for knowledge’s sake is a human trait, not a Western one.

If the songs are not sung, the stories not told, the knowledge not repeated, then valuable information may be lost.

The more I play with these memory spaces, the more the whole system becomes an integrated whole of many mnemonic parts.

have no doubt that the elders ran a calendar using solar, stellar and lunar observations while telling stories of characters visible in the night skies.

Boscawen-Un is more of an oval than a circle, averaging about 24 metres in diameter