A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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songline
A songline is a route across Aboriginal Australian country recorded in a sung sequence, in which the order of the verses is the order of the places along the way. The song encodes waterholes, landmarks, boundaries, and the events of the Dreaming that made them, so a person who knows the song can navigate country they have never walked. Some songlines run for thousands of miles.
Etymology
The English term is a rough translation for a set of concepts that have their own names in each Aboriginal language. It was popularized by Bruce Chatwin’s 1987 book of the same name. Aboriginal writers and researchers generally use songlines alongside their own words, even though the concept isn’t uniform across the continent.
Notes
What makes them work as navigation is that the sequence is fixed and the melodic contour is reported to track the shape of the ground, so the song is a record with an internal order that cannot be shuffled. They are also property; a section belongs to particular people who have the right and the obligation to sing it, and the responsibility passes down specific lines.