My thoughts about this beautiful book are going to be inadequate because it’s due back at the library before I have time to read it properly, but I still think it’s worthwhile drawing attention to Songlines, Tracking the Seven Sisters, edited by Adjunct Professor Margo Neale from the Australian National University and written in collaboration with Aboriginal knowledge holders from Martu country and Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara (APY) and Ngaanyatjarra lands. Neale is well-placed for this complex role because she is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Historical Research, and Senior Curator and Principal Advisor to the Director (Indigenous) of the National Museum of Australia.
Like other books from remote Indigenous communities that I have come across, Songlines, Tracking the Seven Sisters is produced in a collaborative way but is distinguished by having been conceived not from a museum or university within a Western paradigm but derives from a concern of Indigenous people themselves, that knowledge is being lost as old people pass away and young ones are distracted by modern technologies. As Neale says in the Introduction, ‘Alive with the Dreaming’, elders knew that they must use Western ways of holding the knowledge, waiting for some time in the future, after the elders had passed on and [the young people] were ready to learn.
My first understandings about the term ‘songlines’ was from the English author Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines because I wanted to include the concept in what I was teaching about Australian exploration. I had searched without success for an Indigenous explanation among my resources at school (The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture and Australian Dreaming, 40,000 Years of Aboriginal History). These were books that Margo Neale herself had recommended to participants in the Summer School for History that I had attended in 2008, but useful as they were for many things as we introduced Aboriginal Perspectives into the study of space, nutrition and safety round the home, I retired from teaching still keen to find an Indigenous explanation of the concept of songlines or Tjukurpa. So I was delighted when I stumbled across Songlines, Tracking the Seven Sisters and I asked my library to get a copy for me.
Songlines, Tracking the Seven Sisters was published to accompany an exhibition currently on at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, but it is not the usual exhibition where the exhibits are sourced from art galleries and other museums.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/12/27/songlines-tracking-the-seven-sisters-edited-... ( )