The anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose spent two years among the Yarralin people of the Victoria River Valley and found that there is a temporal distinction between Dreaming and ordinary time. Most senior people, she wrote, trace their genealogies back three generations and talk about their grandparents coming from the Dreaming; ordinary time begins about a hundred years ago and is made up of the day-to-day passage of time, marked with things like aging and the changing of seasons. This means that Dreaming is forever, but also precedes us. Rose conceptualized this seeming contradiction through the image of a great wave that “follows behind us obliterating the debris of our existence and illuminating, as a synchronous set of events, those things which endure.”
The Dreaming tracks enabled a thriving economic marketplace in Aboriginal society, something that European colonizers thought was impossible. They were convinced that Aboriginal people wandered the land in a struggle for survival and a constant search for food and water. That perception of an impoverished race on the brink of extinction lingered for many hundreds of years, but today it is irrefutable that Aboriginal trading routes could easily compete with civilization’s greatest examples, such as the Inca and Incense roads. As Dale Kerwin, an Aboriginal historian and scholar at Griffith University, has extensively documented in his book Aboriginal Dreaming Paths and Trading Routes, Aboriginal people traded red ochre, pearls, spears, baskets, fishhooks, nuts, grinding stones, axes, boomerangs, resin, and intellectual property—songs containing information on how to find waterholes and food—over thousands of miles and for eons. One of the mines where red ochre was collected for trade was in continuous use for 20,000 years; the Silk Road only began some 2,200 years ago and lasted about 1,600 years. Some of the longest Aboriginal trading routes were created for pituri, a native nicotine plant. Cultivated and then baked in sand ovens, it could be chewed or smoked and acted as a stimulant; it was traded over an area of at least 340,000 square miles. At times as many as five hundred traders would gather to sell and buy it. Pituri was moved along a virtual “highway,” a Dreaming track that stretches for some 2,300 miles and is made up of stories with regional variants. For example, from Port Augusta to Alice Springs the story is the Urumbula or Native Cat Dreaming, and across the Simpson Desert it is known as a Two Dogs’ Dreaming story. Kerwin cites an Arrernte elder, Isabel Tarrago, from the Simpson Desert, whose mother cultivated pituri and was a “song woman” who knew the trade routes. “We are linked by song to people at Borroloola by the Dog Dreaming, the mob [group] there are connected to granny and mum through this song and so am I,” said Tarrago. “We are related across huge distances by extension of this Dreaming and song. The country is the text to be read and song is the means to unravel the text.”
Kerwin has written that Dreaming tracks were an aid for spatial orientation, and that a further aid “resides in mnemonics and rote learning associated with oral traditions and songlines. This orientation technique relies on the ability of the traveller to recall ideas and experiences that have been imprinted into social memory.” The Aboriginal traveler could implicitly trust the logic and navigational skills of the ancestors who traveled before them. Kerwin explains how the ancestors employed tremendous wisdom when they created the Dreaming tracks:
[The ancestors] know on which side an obstacle can be passed, where there is firm land which leads through a bog, and where the best going is: sand, rock, or dry soil. The spirits know the easiest approach. And through their work and through infinite time, the Dreamtime spirits sculptured the landscape and taught how the country should be read. Aboriginal people see the country in the landscape and the Dreamtime paths everywhere.
In some cases, the mistakes of ancestors are manifest in the landscape and linger as a lesson for the traveler. For the Arrernte people, gum trees around the Todd River are the Caterpillar people that were trying to reach Emily Gap from Mt. Zeil and became lost; they remain there as evidence of how not to get to Emily Gap. Often songlines tell a traveler where a waterhole is, or a claypan that might represent the former camp of an ancestor and indicate the presence of a certain animal or bush vegetable. In this way the songs are a kind of memory device, investing emotion and meaning into the earth by turning even the most innocuous-looking rock or hill into a story of how it came to be and why it looks the way it does. In other words, the stories create landmarks for the mind to hold onto. One term for these memory aids, which arguably increased survivability in the bush, is “totemic geography,” which, as anthropologist Luise Hercus has said, gives “deeper significance to ordinary geography and makes it more memorable.”
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When was the first Dreaming story told? There is no way to know precisely. But even the most conservative estimate makes Aboriginal oral history the oldest in the world. Until very recently, there was a consensus that the longest time period that human memories can be transmitted between generations before their meaning has completely changed or become obscured from the original is five hundred to eight hundred years. But in 2016, two Australian researchers published a paper in the journal Australian Geographer that upended this idea. Patrick Nunn and Nicholas Reid recorded stories from twenty-one locations around coastal Australia, from the Gulf of Carpentaria in the north to Kangaroo Island in the south. In each place they found stories about a time when parts of the coastline now under the ocean were actually dry land. The researchers matched the stories to geological evidence of post-glacial sea-level rise. It seems that these stories have been repeated from one generation to the next for a minimum of seven thousand years but possibly for as long as thirteen thousand years and represent “some of the world’s earliest extant human memories.”
Nunn and Reid explain these nearly unbelievable figures by pointing to several characteristics of Aboriginal culture that elucidate how such a faithful oral transmission was made possible. They point to the great value Aboriginal people place on precision in telling stories “right.” Additionally, not everyone has the authority to tell a story; only some people have ownership over them and are therefore held accountable to learn them faithfully. “For example, a man teaches the stories of his country to his children,” write Nunn and Reid. “His son has his knowledge of those stories judged by his sister’s children—for certain kin are explicitly tasked with ensuring that those stories are learned and recounted properly—and people take those responsibilities seriously.”
By embedding story in landscapes and the actions of ancestor beings, the Aboriginal oral tradition of songlines is strikingly similar to other oral traditions—the ballads, epics, and children’s rhymes found in places like Ireland, Yugoslavia, ancient Greece, and numerous folk traditions. In his book Memory in Oral Traditions, the cognitive neuroscientist David Rubin writes that there are certain properties that all these oral traditions share. Orally transmitted poems and epics are concrete, that is, they use actions by agents, like heroes or gods, who perform specific acts that are easy to visualize. The subjects of epic poems and songs are rarely abstract concepts like justice or heroism. Instead, these qualities are illustrated through the actions of protagonists. Second, Rubin argues, oral epics are almost always spatial because this makes it easier for the human mind to remember them. “There are no one-scene epics; travel is the rule,” writes Rubin. “Homeric epic refers to itself as oime (path). The Odyssey is an odyssey, with hypothetical maps of travel shown in some editions. Even in the Iliad, where large segments occur between Troy and the sea, the location of battles and other events is constantly changing. Because such spatial layout typically follows a known path, order information can be preserved. In contrast, it might be confused if there were one large, simultaneous image.”
Rubin thinks that oral traditions developed to avoid weaknesses of human memory, which more easily records scenes rather than abstract knowledge. And these traditions utilize another strength of our brains: using rhythm and music to cue memory. Consider how many of us learn the alphabet as a child by singing it. With some practice, the notes be
come bound to the letters, allowing the mind to recall them with ease. Same with other popular children’s verses or songs, like “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” or “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” In some cases, it’s difficult to extract the words from the melody. Because in our memory, the music and the words are inseparable. Gregorian chanting used music as a mnemonic device by pairing psalms and mass chants to melodies; one academic estimates that the Gregorian chant repertoire included nearly four thousand texts by the Middle Ages. Rubin has argued that we shouldn’t think of memory in its most common sense, as abstract traces in the mind, but as a socially guided rhythm of body movement and gesture that is an integral part of transmission. In oral cultures, the kind of rhythm used to memorize songs and the information contained within them exists “only in its performance, and that performance is as much motor as it is verbal.”
Rubin’s hero was a Harvard literature professor by the name of Albert Lord, who in 1960 published The Singer of Tales, a canonical text on oral traditions. For years, Rubin made summer pilgrimages to visit Lord, and he told me, “Lord did not even like the word memory. No one memorizes an epic poem. They sing it.”
DREAMTIME CARTOGRAPHY
One morning I took a taxi from a sleepy suburb south of the city of Perth to the airport and boarded a four-hour plane ride to Darwin, Australia’s tropical northernmost settlement, which sits on a nub jutting into the Timor Sea. My window seat faced west, and for most of the time we flew over the Western Desert, a region of some five hundred thousand square miles that includes the Gibson, Great Sandy, and Great Victoria Deserts. One European explorer referred to this land as a “vast howling wilderness.” To me, the landscape looked like watercolor paints spilled on parchment and then torched by heat. Pink, red, and ochre earth swirled together; venae cavae of ancient riverbeds and salt lakes that appeared shrunken and concentrated in dark purples and scalding whites. Its size scrambled my mind. Wherever they went in the “New World,” European colonists were convinced they had discovered terra nullius, “land belonging to no one,” which they eagerly laid claim to. Australia was the same. “Where, we ask, is the man endowed with even a modicum of reasoning powers, who will assert that this great continent was ever intended by the Creator to remain an unproductive wilderness?” asked the Sydney Herald in 1838. From thirty thousand feet, central Australia still looks empty; there are no cities or agriculture projects evincing human dominion of the desert. But terra nullius was, and is, a lie. The eye of a foreigner can still see this desert as a vast howling wilderness, when in fact the Dreaming—called “Tjukurrpa” by the Pitjantjatjara people of central Australia—and the tracks left by ancestors in the desert represent tens of thousands of years of uninterrupted human habitation.
Outside Perth, our flight path took us northeast toward the town of Meekatharra, not far from the start of the Canning Stock Route. I thought about how the Aboriginal scouts in Canning’s party seemed to have taken enormous pains to not give up the location of the most secret Dreaming places: the stock route twists and turns even as it slices through the land on a north-south axis. “Whitefellas just reckon go where the straight line is,” said Jawurji Mervyn Street, a cattleman and artist who lives in the Yiyili community in the Western Desert, about the route. “In the Martu side there’s no straight line. You can’t go straight when you got some special thing in the road. You’re gonna have to dodge around. The stock road circles round and round, and I been thinking straight away: might be some special place there, and the guides made it clear all the way by going around it.” Despite the constant threat of violence, the scouts tried to protect the sanctity of the country.
About midway through the trip, the plane passed over the Simpson Desert, the place where the doctor and explorer David Lewis traveled with two Antikarinya men, Wintinna Mick and Mick Stewart, back in 1972. Their journey together represents one of the first cases in which someone attempted to record Aboriginal navigation practices, and as a result discovered that the people wayfinding in Australia’s deserts possessed some of the most precise orienting abilities known to man.
Twelve years before he went to Australia, Lewis had participated in the world’s first single-handed transatlantic yacht race, and he later circumnavigated the world with his wife and two young daughters. Born in Britain but raised in New Zealand, he was fascinated by traditional South Pacific navigation and undertook a sailing trip from Tahiti to New Zealand without using a compass or sextant. His book, We, the Navigators (1972), was the summation of eight years of research into Polynesian and Micronesian navigation traditions, including sailing thirteen thousand miles in the western Pacific and the first circumnavigation of the world in a catamaran. Always eager for the next adventure, Lewis went to Australia because he had become fascinated by Aboriginal route-finding and launched a three-year research project to study spatial orientation practices.
Once there, however, Lewis discovered he was unprepared for what he encountered. While he assumed he would find individuals who used environmental guides like the sun and stars for orientation, much like the South Pacific Islanders he had previously written about, he instead found something entirely different. “While there are certain elements very roughly analogous to the mould I had in mind of non-instrumental maritime usage,” described Lewis, “this was a misleading formulation on two counts, since it tended to convey connotations of featureless landscape and of a celestially based system of reference.” Lewis realized that in Australia, no such thing as a “featureless landscape” existed. Furthermore, Aboriginal spatial orientation didn’t seem to fit into any known theory of navigation that Lewis was aware of. Mick and Stewart, his companions on his first foray into the desert, never seemed to use external references of any kind save for a few intermittent and, what seemed to Lewis, unremarkable landmarks. Instead, what they did was take a mental note of the starting point of a trip and then travel blindly through the landscape until the hill, waterhole, tree, or rock they were aiming for appeared. They rarely took stock of their route or reevaluated their direction, yet they could travel great distances with unerring accuracy; it was almost as though Mick and Stewart had simply managed to memorize hundreds of square miles of desert landscape. Lewis began to wonder whether Mick and Stewart might possess a total recall of every topographical feature of any country they had ever traveled in.
“A single visit 40 years ago would be sufficient to make an indelible imprint,” he wrote. When Lewis asked Mick to explain how he knew which direction to travel in, Mick just told him, “I have a feeling.” Then he drew Lewis a map in the sand to demonstrate. “If I go south 10 miles, then a little east, to get back home I must go north 10 miles and a little west,” he said. “If there are no landmarks I still know the directions. Aborigines knew north, south, east and west before the white man’s compass.” Okay, persisted Lewis, but how had Mick found his way over twenty-three miles of identical sand hills that day? “I know this north-west direction,” said Mick, “not by the sun but by the map inside my head.”
Over the next three years Lewis worked as a visiting fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra and traveled nearly five thousand miles by Land Rover and on foot all over the Simpson Desert and along the Canning Stock Route. He worked with Antikarinyha, Pintupi, and Luritja language speakers, asking them to point to unseen places after traveling and then comparing the results to his compass readings. Again and again, their accuracy was unerring.
One day in Western Luritja-Aranda country, two Pintupi men by the name of Jeffrey Tjangala and Yapa Yapa Tjangala brought Lewis to what seemed like a featureless landscape of squat mulga trees and spear grass. As he later described in the journal Oceania, the earth was flat and devoid of big trees, creeks, and sand hills, and visibility was limited to about three hundred feet. The men saw a malu (kangaroo) and stopped the Land Rover to shoot it, but the .22 bullet only wounded the animal. In order to track it through the bush, they left the vehicle behind and walked into the mulga. After half an hour on
foot, they killed the kangaroo, and then Jeffrey and Yapa Yapa started to make their way back. “How do you know we are heading straight towards the Land Rover?” Lewis asked. Jeffrey touched his forehead and then swung his arm around to show how they had followed the malu round one way and then another. “We take a short cut,” he said. “Are you using the sun?” asked Lewis. “No,” said Jeffrey, and then walked for fifteen minutes directly to the car.
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