In Australia, Song Has Power

Deep in Australia’s Northern Territory, there is scant light pollution and the skies are full of stars. I asked my companion, David, to teach me the unfamiliar constellations, so different from those I see in my home in the Northern Hemisphere. An Indigenous Australian from the Central Desert Region of the continent, he was quick to comply.

“Up there,” he pointed, “is the head of the emu, see?”

I didn’t.

He traced a swirl with his finger, “See, that’s the tail.”

I still didn’t see. I pointed to the sky, “So those stars —” I started, before David interrupted.

“Ah, no, we don’t look at the stars, we look at the spaces in between. Look at the dark spaces.”

The whole sky suddenly popped in a beautiful Gestalt switch: The emu became clear, and the landscape of stars subtly shifted to a very different type of picture from what I was used to.

This was only the first of many upheavals to my mental universe during my brief trip to Australia. The following day we drove six hours further into the bush, and I spent three halcyon days talking to Yidumduma Bill Harney, an elder of the Wardaman tribe who has lived in the same area for most of his 80-odd years. (He doesn’t know precisely how old he is but is sure he was born before World War II broke out.) Later, I heard on the recordings of our conversations how at odds our metaphysical systems are: his culture, tens of thousands of years old, and my upstart Western constructs. Thanks to his patience and interest, I gradually came to understand more about this ancient society’s cosmology, though many things remained stubbornly beyond my grasp.

I was there with a documentary team to capture a way of life that has never needed, and thus never developed, a system of writing, despite the complexity of the society. Instead, Indigenous Australians like Bill store cultural memory, law and survival in the songs that guide every part of life, from marriage and inheritance to knowledge of medicine, hunting and the stars, all contained within an intricate mythology. For Bill, the songs in his and his tribe’s heads are more reliable than any written words could be, and not because of their shared nature but because of the nature of song itself. They have a reality I still cannot fully comprehend, an independent existence that Bill could not change if he wanted to.

The songs map onto the land, creating physical trails that crisscross the whole continent. “Songline trails were made by the creator, the creating people — they were all human then.” Bill was describing the events of the dreamtime, “a billion years ago,” when the country was mud and ancestors roamed around, singing into being the land that we see around us and, in the process, gifting the songline trails to humans. “They made a creation song, a songline trail, a naming for all the places — a floodplain, a tabletop hill, a pointy hill, singing all the time, from place to place to place, naming each one, and they go all over. Everywhere.” These so-called songlines not only provide maps through their descriptions of landmarks and geography but are also repositories for all the cultural memory of the peoples, wrapping together creation stories, bushlore and social rules.

I spent the next few days grappling with this nature of song and of the dreamtime, finding that more information from Bill only emphasized how incompatible our cosmologies were; I kept realizing how I’d misunderstood him in previous conversations, needing to ask again and again about the same stories and concepts. In retrospect, I can only marvel at his patience and good humor.

The first thing we had to do was introduce me to the ancestors that guard the country. We walked to the nearby creek, Bill pointing out the tiny turtles with red bars across their head, crabs and small fish darting in the clear water, telling me which were edible and which were poisonous to humans. Standing on the bank, he sang to the ancestors, introducing me so that they didn’t think I was an enemy of the land and try to push me out. We both knelt after the song, and Bill splashed water on my head: “When we bring a stranger, gotta water your head, so you don’t get sick from the land. They’re introduced to you, the spirits, welcome you to the country — that’s what we say, that’s the water.”

A black-and-white butcher bird flew in front of us and seemed to drop a feather at my feet. “Look, you see, the ancestors are accepting you, welcoming you,” he said, matter-of-factly. I picked it up and tucked it in my notebook. “Yeah, you look after it, keep it, take it home; the ancestors know you now.”

As we walked, he introduced me to the bush, information constantly spilling out of him, how the berry from this tree is good for a stomachache (in fact “all the trees have medicine in them”), which trees have good wood for building, which are used for hunting spears, which for walking sticks. He showed me a paperbark tree, telling me he was born under one, and indeed the bark flaked just like sheets of waterlogged paper. I asked about the huge spiders we were walking past, whether they could kill me. “Are they bothering you?” he asked. I said they weren’t bothering me now, but they might if they tried to kill me. “If they’re not bothering you, and you’re not bothering them, why are you bothering?” he succinctly replied, a gentle put-down but also a putting-at-ease in this landscape that seemed so welcoming but, I’d been told, was so lethal. He talked of hunting, how to catch fish or crocodiles but only taking what you need, being careful how you leave the hunting ground as well as use it, how to whistle to the birds or shoot a spear of grass.

I asked him to tell me more about this creation of the world from mud, the dreamtime. “Yeah,” he started, “but the white men, they don’t understand the dreamtime.” I’d heard this before, that however familiar someone is with the culture, it is not generally well understood by non-Indigenous people. This is at least partially thanks to Western anthropologists, one of whom coined the English term in what has been described as a mistranslation. Yet despite its unsuitability, “dreamtime” stuck, to the point that Indigenous communities also use it when speaking or writing in English.

Suggestions for better translations include “the eternity,” since this period of the ancestors is seen as outside time, existing in the past, present and future. At least, this is true as far as my reading told me, but given that much of this reading material was by “white men” (and women), I was ready to abandon it all in favor of listening to Bill. He returned to the dreamtime repeatedly during my time with him because it is woven into all the songs, which also contain instructions for how to live, from information about the plants and animals of the bush to the complex laws governing human society.

We stopped at an outcrop with extraordinary and powerful art in vivid colors. We sat and Bill told the story of the art through song, with his clapsticks. It was a great performance, complete with the sounds of an emu drinking at a water hole, but of course I couldn’t understand the words, so he followed it with an explanation in more prosaic — and unsung — English. He told me that in the dreamtime, a sleeping dog has his ear split by an inquisitive boy and lets out a mighty howl. “When [the dog] sung out ‘koooo’ like this” (he howls to demonstrate), “the world became changed from soft, high mound, and it became a rock.” He pointed to the evidence, and even I, the outsider, could see it. “There are all the footprints you can see,” Bill said, pointing them out all over the rock, “of human footprints, kangaroo footprints, all around in there, from when they walk around in the mud. Now when it became a rock, there’s the footprints there, just like you walk in fresh cement, you left your footprints.”

We were at “gandawokja” (the moon rock). “The shadow of the old moon, he went into all the rock as well,” Bill said, explaining what happened when the dog let out the howl, “and everybody changed, became a tree, the birds, the kangaroo. First we were human; now everything changed.” Bill stopped to point out a peeling piece of paint. “Gotta bring the boys up here,” he said. “Look at that white, needs painting, can teach ’em that, the song.” The fresh paint doesn’t make the art new in any sense for Bill, because the song sung to renew it simply reinforces the original reality of the ancestors in the rock.

The newly populated world after the dog’s howl still contained the songlines the ancestors trod during their creation, threading over the whole continent. Humans were bequeathed these songlines to be passed on and on, and each child inherits a “dreaming.” These, like the dreamtime, are eternal — or at least as far as I could understand from Bill. The dreaming is from one ancestor and exists both before and after the child; they are born into an existing dreaming. This is made clear at the first kick in the womb: Whichever songline the mother is standing on when she feels this kick determines the dreaming, because different ancestors trod the different songlines. So if she is standing on the kangaroo ancestor’s songline, the child has a kangaroo dreaming. “Lee-dee, like Lydia, means grasshopper in my language,” Bill told me, “And I’m from the grasshopper dreaming, so now that’s your dreaming too.”

Song has power to create reality, but this reality, unlike the dreamtime itself, is not eternal. The songs must be sung by the humans left behind, in a constant cycle of renewal. The annual burning had happened in the weeks before I arrived, the charred plants still evident, yet the bush more vibrant and verdant because of it. “You see that little tree over there, that got burnt? You see that little shoot beside it? That’s regeneration — it’s the same tree, but stronger for the fire, the song.” The land isn’t permanent, yet the song, or the performance of the song, makes it so: “You got to put the songlines through the landscape, the people, the animals, the grass, the trees, they’re all created, and for that to make happen you got to sing the songlines.” What if this didn’t happen? “Everything would change, go silent, everything would get hot and go dry,” Bill said. This puts the catastrophic bushfires in the south of the country in a different light, but Bill was sanguine about that, too, saying songlines can always be revived. “We can just sit, connect our minds to the Earth, you bring it all up into your mind and it builds, like a computer, getting it from the internet, that is the Earth, and out it comes as song. It leads you all the way to recognize the history and the story and the land.”

As we walked back down from the moon rock, Bill taught me how to say “put a billy of tea on the fire” in Wardaman, and I got the hint; we sat and drank tea, me constantly scribbling in my notebook. At some point he leaned over, pointed to what I’d written and asked, “What you writing there?” “I’m writing what you’re telling me,” I replied. Bill knows the alphabet but can’t easily read words; he knows just enough to read the signs on the highway or the name of a shop, but he has never read more than a couple of words together. I read out the bit he was pointing to, verbatim quotes from him. He smiled with satisfaction. “That’s right, that’s right.”

I already thought it was right, because he just said it and I wrote it down as he said it, but his periodic need to check showed a cautious attitude to writing: There could be a slip, a distance between his words and mine, spoken and written. If his songs came directly from the ancestors, he can be sure of them, and he knows their power of creation; my words were brand new, recorded in front of him, the status unknown — until checked back.

We sat for a while drinking our smoky tea. “Why don’t you write a book then?” he asked.

“A book about you?” I replied, and his answer was instantaneous.

“No! No, no, I don’t want that! I want a book about the whole culture. You know, the songlines, they go everywhere; can you write about that?”

Where would we end up, I asked. “They go everywhere.” Maybe the sea, I suggested.

“Ah, the saltwater mob, they’re a different mob again,” he said.

We might go to the Central Desert, I suggested.

“Further! Further!” Bill said. Perhaps I was looking daunted, because he reassured me: “We take you, see, we take you around and you walk the songlines with us.”

With something like 360 different Aboriginal languages, I wondered how that would work and asked Bill what happens when you walk so far you do not understand the words of the locals anymore. “There are different words because of the different languages, there are different names for things, but the song is the same, see?”

It was just like the constellations of the stars: I very much didn’t see. I asked if the music, the tune was the same, but this wasn’t right, either.

“The song,” Bill insisted, “the song itself is the same everywhere, it doesn’t matter about the words, it’s the law.”

The nature of song was at the heart of my grappling with Bill’s world, and I still don’t know if I really understand what Bill meant. That song created the world, and that it regenerated the world, I could see — there are many cultures where words and music have power, from Sufi mysticism to Christian chanting to spells and witchcraft. But understanding the reality of the song, rather than its power to make reality, kept eluding me. If it wasn’t the music or the words that made the song, what was it? What was the durable nature of song that I couldn’t grasp?

Leaving the metaphysical reality of song aside, I went back to language, wondering about mutual comprehension quite apart from walking the songlines: How do you greet, discuss food, make small talk, perform rituals and ceremonies without a common language? Such concerns are easily dismissed, in fact barely understood, by Bill. “All groups speak the different languages, but we understand through the skin way,” he said, referring to the skinship system, an additional affiliation you are born into, along with (but separate from) your family, tribe and dreaming.

More important than the language are the rituals governing the crossing of borders between what Bill calls “countries,” the areas of different tribes. “There are boundaries, and rules governing boundaries, and everyone respects those,” Bill said, explaining how conflict is avoided and goods are traded between neighboring tribes. The elaborate structures governing these border crossings make the hostile environment of Heathrow Airport seem like a doddle — though there’s a lot more goodwill, including the whole hosting tribe gathering for a party.

“What you do if you have to go down to Alice Springs, you take a letter stick. You travel with your stick, with a letter on it, you carry it on the back of your neck, everyone knows, ah, he a mailman,” Bill said. So there is writing here — but, apparently, it’s limited to symbols for tribes, for use in travel, and used only for this one purpose. It was never developed to capture a language and transmit information down the generations or across a continent.

The next step, Bill explained, is also from a distance: “You have a long spear, you throw it from a distance, you throw it high like this, and it lands like this, and the little feather starts moving, and they say, ‘Hey, a garnin [spear] with a dia dia [feather]; come on, everyone.’ They gather everyone, and they go, and they look at the feather and they can tell if you’re this mob or that mob; they know from the direction of the spear, too.”

The resulting ceremony — “everyone comes, hundreds of people,” with song and dance and special dress and body paint — depends on the reason for the boundary crossing, whether it’s for trade, looking for marriage arrangements, or discussing medical matters like medicine swaps. “Watering your head, it will be all of that,” Bill said. Or it could be walking a songline, walking the law, in which case the ceremony is repeated at the next country boundary, and the next. And so surely, I suggested, language could be a barrier?

“That’s OK because you’re with them, they’ll be taking you, like they’re your interpreter,” Bill said.

I persisted, knowing how the languages proliferate and divide: “What about when you’re a few countries down, and you can’t understand your interpreter anymore?”

“You can always tell what your skin is, jubay, jumaini or whatever,” Bill said, giving examples of different skinships. “They might ask your family, but skin first.”

A recent theory of Aboriginal languages posits that the vast majority of them spread from one single area in the northeast of the continent, and although it’s not entirely clear if this was a slow process over the tens of thousands of years that humans have been on the land, it seems more likely that it was a situation of “rapid replacement” over the past 4,000 years. Perhaps the songs have remained the same since well before this time, only the language changing as languages do, and communication remained possible through the shared cosmology kept fixed through the songlines.

After lunch, Bill sang me a lullaby, and I fell asleep in the hay, newly fearless of spiders and snakes. When I woke up and thanked him for the lullaby, he told me, “It’s the same with cattle when you’re driving.” (Bill worked on the ranches when he was younger.) “When you sing the song, it make them tired to go to sleep, it puts them relaxed and they go to sleep.”

He didn’t understand why I laughed; for him, all animals are the same, with humans just one type of animal — they have a role in the landscape and the songline trails, and they have close connections to other species through their dreamings. Life is interconnected in a way that has been lost in much of the rest of the world.

With another billy of tea, we continued on song, “thousands and thousands of song.” Again, we quickly ran into category errors. I asked about social rituals, finding your way, maps of the stars, and though he agreed that all of this is contained in song, it turns out they’re not separate songs but all wrapped up together in the stories of the ancestors. A single narrative, about an emu, a dog or a kangaroo, might provide the law on one aspect of life and the names of the landscape and finding your way — all at once. And it’s not all benign, not all lullabies, medicine and ceremony.

“If someone’s running with your wife, or your man or something, they’ll sing that girl or that man, to destroy them. The spiritual way, the wind comes, and it gets into their body, and it makes them sick, and destroys them and kills them … makes them silly in the head,” Bill said. From divine punishment to bringing the rain, song, sung by the right person, has power.

Bill suddenly leaned forward, as I sipped my tea. “You gotta write ’em all down! When we’re talking you’ve gotta write it all down!” He was laughing, and I laughed too, and picked up my pen, slightly afraid of the power of the song to send me silly in the head as punishment for not writing. But there was only so far we could go: Bill couldn’t tell me some things, as a woman, and he doesn’t know some things the women know — many of the ceremonies are segregated and secret. So my job before we traced the songlines would be to attend a ceremony.

“But I couldn’t write about that, could I?” I said.

Bill hadn’t thought this far through the idea of a book, though of course agreed I couldn’t, but added,

“You need to know what you need to know first.” I started to discuss how things could be written about without breaking taboos, speaking of sketching the generalities, glossing over detail, but the conversation seemed at cross-purposes, Bill ascribing different powers to my writing than I do.

“A book would tell it, see, what we can’t tell,” he said. I was taken aback, thinking of the curse songs that would rain down on me if I were to tell of the taboo, the secret, but I didn’t think that was what he meant, and I pushed him. “Yeah, no, no, you’d only say what the women tell you you can say, of course, they would know.”

I wasn’t sure what was driving Bill’s desire for a book that would record the sung ancestor trails, a book he wouldn’t be able to read. Was it about communication to an outside audience, one that has misunderstood and misused the Indigenous community for so long, something to make the “white man” understand? Or was it more to do with the status of the written word, that this would in some way “fix” their history in another form, other than song? In the history of Australia, writing has had great power, both taking away and granting rights, land and power. But Bill’s culture, which has probably existed in a similar form for tens of thousands of years, continuing an incredibly complex way of life that incorporates the whole natural world, clearly has no use for writing; society and the environment, indistinguishable in Bill’s worldview, flourish without it. The words of the ancestors are fixed, “or you’d be lost,” Bill said, literally lost, without a means to find water or your way home at night, and lost in the culture, unable to navigate social rules or walk beyond your own “country” without the law of song to guide you over the songline trails. With the song fixed in memories across the continent, there is not only no need for writing, but it would actually fragment the common culture; without the song itself as an independent entity, the stories and information would be incommunicable across language barriers.

Despite his enthusiasm for a book, Bill has an awareness of how writing can go wrong; in Bill’s way of describing it, there’s almost an affectionate mockery of the white man’s methods. “When the white men came through the country … we had the names, but they gave them new ones,” Bill said. “White people named it like Katherine, ours is Kadgerian, so they gave it something similar.” He laughed when he accounted for the settlement of Brandy Bottle, near where he was born: “Someone riding through just dropped his brandy bottle there!” He is not threatened by writing, because in his ways of telling stories, both about the white men and the ancestors, it emerges just how superior his traditional system is. “The white people, they take these things and put ’em in a museum, but we don’t, we live with them, teach our young.” But at the same time he’s open to the possibilities of writing, the power of communication to those outside his culture — perhaps the flip side of not feeling threatened by another way of doing things. For Bill, the results of writing are more ephemeral than song, devoid of its creative power, a passing fad, almost, though, like many fads, not without interest. A book might be fun and would correct the misunderstandings of those unfortunate people who can read, yes, but who haven’t grown up in the bush with the guidance of the ancestors through ceremony, dance, tradition and, especially, song.

These songs are still sung, an act of endless re-creation, literally. “We sing for the happiness on the land, the regeneration of the trees, the plants; everything is helped with song. It helps the earth, and atmosphere, and clouds, and the sky. And the landscape: everything all in one from up top to the down.” The songline trails require these repeat performances by the humans living among them, generation after generation. Despite their own very concrete reality, they must be regularly sung to maintain both the existence of the world that the ancestors first created and, in some way, themselves.

I read this piece to Bill over the phone, mindful of his claim that “the white men don’t understand,” and he seemed to agree with what I’ve said (“that’s right, that’s right”) yet followed up with, “So when are you coming back here? You can’t understand, you can’t write, without being here.” So I still can’t be sure I’ve captured what Bill was trying to teach me, and he seemed to think that the words would be different if I’d written them there, with him, the land an essential ingredient of the whole.

When I think back to those few days in the bush with Old Man Bill, there is a curious sense of the human-ness of the landscape, curious because everyone’s response to news of my trip was about the dangers of the wildlife. My notebook from the time says that I wished I’d told Bill it felt “homely”; when I read that, I called him to tell him so. “That’s right!” he said. “It’s home, the bush. When are you coming back?”

It felt welcoming and easy to be in the bush, from making tea on the fire to falling asleep in the hay. Of course, it helped that I was with someone who knew every species of plant and animal, along with their uses and their dangers, and could explain it all to me. But perhaps there’s something more to this, that Bill’s attitude to humans as a species — as just one among many, all sharing the same space — allows for a more comfortable coexistence. When you are not fighting to keep one sphere for humans and a separate one, barring a few favored domesticated varieties, for nonhuman life-forms, perhaps life is simply easier.

In the Judeo-Christian creation story, God gave humans “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” This seems to have set the Judeo-Christian world on a misguided path, our feeling of being “in charge” seeping into every aspect of life, resulting in polluted water, skies and land, and a climate at the tipping point of recoverable.

The effort to understand Bill, with such a different way of being in the world, and his supporting system of belief, ritual and song, has resulted in lasting change in how I look at the world. It now seems not only damaging but peculiar to have so comprehensively divided the human world from the natural. Decentering humans is better for the environment, other species and ourselves. Of course we can’t go back to being hunter-gatherer societies, but we can surely learn from those cultures that have maintained their place in nature and connection to the land.

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