Any normal supervisor would have pointed out that I had a PhD scholarship for my original topic and a publisher interested in publishing it. To abandon all that to chase some wild idea when I didn’t even have a background in archaeology was clearly foolhardy. Sue Martin, however, was not a normal supervisor.

Elders would retrieve their tjuringa from hiding places at sacred sites, which were visited on journeys to ceremonial grounds.

walk through time when I walk the dog and through space when I do the shopping or sing in the shower. Each day, I choose to either recall what has already been encoded or add something new. There is no hurry. No additional time has to be allocated to the study; it just blends in naturally with my normal life. Like the oral cultures I write about,

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

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

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

The use of plants may also seem to be more magical than practical. For example, various species in the Datura genus are used in spiritual and recreational activities because of their hallucinogenic properties. Search a little deeper and you will find that Pueblo Zuni doctors from New Mexico use Datura as an anaesthetic for operations and as a

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.

created songlines through my local landscape, stories in the skyscape, a totem pole and an array of handheld decorated objects. I experimented with them all. I am now totally and utterly convinced of the power of the memory spaces, both large and small. What astonishes me is that these memory skills were allowed to fade from the Western education