The Songlines

Aboriginals could not believe the country existed until they could see and sing it – just as, in the Dreamtime, the country had not existed until the Ancestors sang it. ‘So the land’, I said, ‘must first exist as a concept in the mind? Then it must be sung? Only then can it be said to exist?’ ‘True.’ ‘In other words, “to exist” is “to be perceived”

The man who went ‘Walkabout’ was making a ritual journey. He trod in the footprints of his Ancestor. He sang the Ancestor’s stanzas without changing a word or note – and so recreated the Creation.

By singing the world into existence, he said, the Ancestors had been poets in the original sense of poesis, meaning ‘creation’. No Aboriginal could conceive that the created world was in any way imperfect.

my aunt would bring an anthology of verse especially chosen for travellers, called The Open Road. It had a green buckram binding and a flight of gilded swallows on the cover.

I pulled from my pocket a black, oilcloth-covered notebook, its pages held in place with an elastic band. ‘Nice notebook,’ he said. ‘I used to get them in Paris,’ I said. ‘But now they don’t make them any more.’

The Aboriginals had an earthbound philosophy. The earth gave life to a man; gave him his food, language and intelligence; and the earth took him back when he died. A man’s ‘own country’, even an empty stretch of spinifex, was itself a sacred ikon that must remain unscarred.

‘To wound the earth’, he answered earnestly, ‘is to wound yourself, and if others wound the earth, they are wounding you. The land should be left untouched: as it was in the Dreamtime when the Ancestors sang the world into existence.’