7 Songlines and Transport routes

The Songlines of Australia were ancient trade routes. These songs are easier to memorise than spoken stories and they tell of the path to take, the significant features and the water and food resources along that path. These cleared paths often provided the route taken by early horse drawn drays and so developed into the modern roads in Australia.

The songlines are part of the traditional knowledge that is shared from childhood for those growing up on their country. The initial story is how to find your way on country, where the features are described as created by an ancient animal or human traversing the land. That animal will be an important food source in the area and knowledge of what it eats, where it rests, when it gives birth, and so on, is vital for survival on that Country. So these are the first things told to children in the Songlines.

This is explained more in the SONGLINES video which is available from National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) Australia

There were many such trade routes across Australia, all known in First Nations stories and linking people across the continent. However it is often not the people who travelled, but artifacts or resources, such as ochre from the mines at Thuwarri Thaa or Wilgie Mia; the Piturie or bush tobacco from Western Australia or the shells from the north. These were passed along the trade routes, and items were swapped around the trade routes.

There were traders in Australia, those who specialised in transporting these goods for at least part of their journey. To help them do this journey they carried maps, on their woomera or shield or on message sticks. The criss-cross patterns on the wooden artefacts suggest the change in direction of the trade route to be taken. Cowan (1992) writes that:

Shield or sand drawings (also message sticks and clubs) formed a geographic map of regions from which trading parties or visitors could draw on knowledge when it came to travelling through unfamiliar territory. 

Knowledge of the stars was important for long land and sea voyages for First Nations as much as for European and Asian seafarers. For First Nations, the land, the sea and the sky are all part of Country and you cannot know one without the other.

One of the most famous songlines is the Seven Sisters Dreaming that crossed Australia from west to east and also had links through tracks off to other centres such as Hindmarsh Island. This is the same story as the Greek Pleiades, the seven sisters running from Orion the hunter. This suggests that there was trade right around the globe long ago, guided by this bright star group as it traverses the globe.