There is suddenly a lot of interest in indigenous themes and concepts and I must confess that I have grown up in Australia with a profound ignorance of aboriginal concepts including the songlines. Though I recently read the book "The greatest estate on earth" by Bill Gammage where he discusses songlines and, in a way, I think he does a slightly better job than the current authors.
What I took away from the current book....and it's something that they do really well....is that the songlines are a huge memory device with multiple layers. The idea of using a journey as a mnemonic device is not new to me and I remember reading a book by Frances Yates called "The art of memory" with something like the theatre of the mind which was basically a roman era idea of using the seats of a theatre like a filing device for memories ........ it was a concept promoted by Giodorno Bruno who was something of a memory whiz. Though he got himself burned at the stake by those lovely people in Rome...the inquisition in about 1600....for various sorts of heresy....including promoting Copernican ideas but also for his ideas about the soul. But the basic concept is the same with pretty much any memory technique ......associate it with some sort of "vibrant" or fantastic story. And it's this story that is easy to recall and thus associate with whatever is supposed to be committed to memory. With the aboriginal songlines they typically combined geographic features with the route to be followed and with story links to key features...like waterholes and food sources nearby ...and maybe this might be tied into ancestral history....such as floods or fires, or battles with rivals.
We have two authors here: Margo Neale is the aboriginal expert and Lynne Kelly is the memory expert. the book is ok but I found myself thinking all the way through that it was a little trite; a little superficial ...and maybe was over-claiming for the songlines. Though Bill Gammage claims that the songlines stretched across the whole of the Australian continent and were a remarkable "religious" feature of aboriginal culture.
Margo makes much of the story of the seven sisters and I have to take her word for it that this story has a widespread (if not universal) following throughout Australia. If so, I DO find that remarkable.
Whether it's possible to have stories handed down by word of mouth over thousands of years (some would claim for 40,000 plus years) and remain essentially intact, I find hard to believe. Though I do recall reading about a group somewhere in the Balkans who had oral stories that were recorded about 1950 and re-recorded about 50 years later and the stories remained almost word perfect even though they were long stories. I think they might have been songs ...and if so, I guess it's more understandable that they remain unchanged because the musicality and rhyming would help maintain consistency. (Though Bible scholarship indicates that the bible has morphed a lot over the years). Margo seems to want to have it both ways: the stories are flexible to allow updating (like with the arrival of the Europeans) yet has maintained its integrity over tens of thousands of years. Seems to me that she can't really have it both ways. We have REAL contemporary evidence of the plasticity of these stories but we have no way of knowing what the stories were like five thousand years ago ....or even two hundred and fifty years ago.
I must say that I did find the recurring idea that knowledge was something that was gradually revealed as one rose higher in the hierarchy to be a bit of a red flag. This is the same sort of technique that is used by cults and secret societies of all sorts and was an idea from the gnostics in the early Christian church. You can't question or criticise because you haven't yet been initiated into the xth level of knowledge. The Scientologists are experts with this technique and I recall one of them (who had risen to the top echelon and then got out of the group) saying that he'd been given the handwritten note with the highest level insight from RL Hubbard himself and it was quite plainly bonkus.
But, of course, very hard to question these higher levels of wisdom because there will always be even higher levels to which one is not privy and therefore you still only have partial knowledge.
I'm happy to accept the songling stories as a mnemonic which combines things such as a geographic map, a pathfinder, landmarks, waterholes, food sources, combined with seasonal factors, tribal history, and so on. And this actually seems quite remarkable to me. But less confident about the claims that they represent an unbroken sequence and consistent narrative over tens of thousands of years. I give the book three stars. ( )