The story and the site are crucial to a landmark exhibition at the National Museum of Australia: Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters. It’s a tale with many layers: a chase, a complex blend of courtship and sexual harrassment, and a Creation story that explains how the country came into being.

The reason for the journey is to visit Cave Hill – Walinynga in the local language – reputedly the only rock art site of its kind that tells the story of the Seven Sisters.

We are travelling to Pitjantjatjara territory, a four hour drive south from Uluru to the small South Australian township of Amata. Wrecked cars and other bits of twisted metal appear by the roadside at long intervals – the desert’s version of public sculpture. The major landmark is Mount Conner, a long flat-topped monolith of reddish rock overshadowed by Uluru’s celebrity. The dominant colour is a pale yellow-grey, offset with the faintest tinges of green. This book invites readers to understand a remarkable way for storing knowledge in memory by adapting song, art, and most importantly, Country, into their lives.Ībout the series: The First Knowledges books are co-authored by Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers the series is edited by Margo Neale, senior Indigenous curator at the National Museum of Australia.įorthcoming titles include: Design by Alison Page & Paul Memmott (2021) Country by Bill Gammage & Bruce Pascoe (2021) Medicine & Plants (2022) Astronomy (2022) Innovation (2023).Under a blue, cloudless sky the road is one long strip of red earth, hemmed in by expanses of dry, tufty grass and scrub. Weaving deeply personal storytelling with extensive research on mnemonics, Songlines: The Power and Promise offers unique insights into Indigenous traditional knowledges, how they apply today and how they could help all peoples thrive into the future. Much more than a navigational path in the cartographic sense, these vast and robust stores of information are encoded through song, story, dance, art and ceremony, rather than simply recorded in writing. Songlines are an archive for powerful knowledges that ensured Australia's many Indigenous cultures flourished for over 60,000 years. 'An act of intellectual reconciliation.' - Lynette Russell 'Let this series begin the discussion.' - Bruce Pascoe

Songlines book margo neale