Talk:Songline

Songline vs. leylines

While I respect your views which you have expressed in the article on songlines, and I'm sure you put them in in good faith, I don't think they are a NPOV. For example, while songlines are obviously a part of Indigenous Australian culture, linking them to the British leylines implies a certain view of the world associated with a New-Age holistic view. Right? So I don't think this is a NPOV. See what you think of my changes, and let's discuss them here. Cheers, Ray RayNorris 10:58, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Some remarks

I'd heard of songlines and read this article hoping to learn about them, and I think I learned very little. A few thoughts and reactions, some stylistic, some on content:

• There ought to be an introduction before the first section heading. The bolded Songlines occurs rather far down the page instead of in the first sentence as it usually is.

• Songlines are also called Dreaming tracks by Indigenous Australians. A reference would be nice -- I assume in the original languages the term "dreaming tracks" was not used. Has this English term become the norm, even for Indigenous Australians?

• Other bits that really need references include: To indigenous peoples, songlines also confer a title and deed to the holder or the keeper of the particular song (or Dreaming) and entails an inherent obligation and reciprocity with the land. And, A number of anthropologists and scientists have found that the Aborigines possess an acute sensitivity to magnetic and vital force flows emanating form the earth, which they refer to as songlines. Scientists have found this? Acute sensitivity to "the vital force flows emanating from the earth"? It's referenced (Lawlor), but really.... sounds like pseudoscience to me, and makes references to Lawlor questionable.

Yes agree it sounds like pseudo science. I think it's probably to do with the section in the Dreamtime article which says that traditionally "the geographic spot where the foetus is first felt moving by the mother is said hold special significance to the child". It also says/suggests that the child is then taught all the songs/songlines associated with that spot, which I could then understand might mean the person would be the keeper of those songs for later generations and effectively custodian of that bit of land. EdwardLane (talk) 19:27, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

• There seems to be too many Big Words (Technobabble? Buzzwords?). Examples: Simulacrum may have once meant that is seems to mean here, but it doesn't anymore, meaning just "a copy". This sentence: The continent of Australia is a system-reticulum of songlines, well, even reading the pages system and reticulum is it not clear what is meant. Looks like technobabble.

I just stuck a wiktionary link in for Reticulum for the same reason - it appears to mean a 'network' EdwardLane (talk) 19:27, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

• The buzzwordism and "pseudoanthropology" gets worse when New Age theories come up. Songlines may be understood as the Earth's subtle energy current. ....the what? Do we have to understand songlines that way? Do Indigenous Australians understand them that way?

• Certainly there is a place for New Age speculation, but it would be nice to learn more about the topic without so much unreferenced and clearly biased, esoteric, Eurocentric speculation.

agree - lets cut the new age stuff or at least move it to a subsection titled newage interpretation :) EdwardLane (talk) 19:27, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

• Not that it isn't cool that some people find the dreaming stuff meaningful in ways far beyond what, I imagine, the Indigenous Australians did/do -- unknowingly tapping into the very patterns of the planet's vital force flows! -- but really, isn't this a variation on the Noble savage stereotype? (ie, "You savages have hit upon something cool and don't even realize it -- let us explain your ways to you")

• Pyne's theories on the use of broadcast burning and fire in general in the creation of travel routes seems a lot more realistic than "geomagnetic wayfinding" (basically, the common practice of burning the land as one traveled created corridors and cleared paths marked by fire; no geomagnetic magical powers needed). To make up for all this complaining, I'll try to add some of his ideas.

That's interesting, I'd not heard that - the songlines describing the local terrain (in terms of the dreamtime) and being the 'song of the journey from place A to place B' made enouh sense to me - but adding the 'oh look someone camped here' does make navigating long distances across the outback (if you know the right songs, or can ask someone to teach you the song) seem less tricky. EdwardLane (talk) 19:27, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

Sorry for the negativity, I'll try to be constructive next time! Pfly 07:08, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

Magnetism - is this relevant?

At the risk of incurring someone's wrath, I've deleted the section which discusses the evidence for animal and human susceptibility to magnetic fields. While the material itself may well be correct, I don't think it belongs here, but in a different article on biomagnetism. As far as I'm aware, there is no evidence cited here or elsewhere that song lines are connected to magnetism. Indeed, as many song-lines traverse the country east-west while the magnetic field goes predominantly north-south, it's hard to see how they can be connected. But even if there was a connection, the material discussing evidence for biomagnetism should be in an article on biomagnetism and not in an article on songlines. RayNorris (talk) 05:50, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

NPOV

I added an {{NPOV}} tag. Really what I wanted to add was a {{fiction}} tag — in a few places the article discusses the spirits in the songs as though they were real, rather than as fictional characters — but since these seem to be religious beliefs (?), it seemed mean to just label them "fiction". —Ruakh_TALK 18:49, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

There are really only a couple sentences that have this issue, and it appears to be mostly a stylistic problem. Changed to a {tone|section}} and limited to the appropriate section. 68.73.84.231 (talk) 04:53, 16 January 2009 (UTC)

Clean-up

I had a go at addressing the comments above, and generally edited the article, re-ordering it, removing dupliacted material, etc. I'd welcome suggestions as to what else would improve this article. RayNorris (talk) 22:32, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

The article says "In some cases, a songline has a particular direction, and walking the wrong way along a songline may be a sacrilegious act (e.g. climbing up Uluru where the correct direction is down)." Which I find interesting. I'd think that all songlines would have a direction.

So for example, if I sang 'start in place A, follow the river bank until you get to the big rock, cross to the southern bank of the stream, look for the mountain, go uphill, get to place B' and I started singing that song in place B, which way would I go downhill, so I'd expect a different song to get from place B to place A. Perhaps 'start at place B, turn your back on the mountain, go downhill to the river, follow the northern bank to the east, get to place A'.

Basically my question is whether there can ever be a songline without a 'particular direction'?

If not the line 'in some cases' should be removed.EdwardLane (talk)

Just had a thought that seems to make my question 'not right' but I don't know how to ask the right question. So instead I'll explain why my question might not be correct. I saw a science progam long ago on bbc (I think) that tested indigenous aboriginal children and european children - by having them view a tray of objects for a short time (something like this) and then the objects were covered. The objects were then removed from the tray - and the participants asked to return the objects to the tray in the correct order. Many european children got the top row and half the second row correct but got the bottom row wrong.

This was reported as being because they took the objects and tried to memorise them as a list. Most (I think all but I'm not sure) of the children of aboriginal background did not do this - instead they had considered the relative spatial relationships between the objects - and then based on knowing the apple and the ballon were diagonal to each other, and so forth mostly managed to reconstruct the tray correctly - including the orientation of the objects on the tray, (in the image I linked to - follow the drumstick and that points at the stork). Some european children also did this. It was suggested that it was using 'spatial intelligence' rather than 'linguistic intelligence' (or something like that) - but that probably means my attempt at guessing an 'example songline text' above is wrong, and it shouldn't be a list of instructions in order. So perhaps some songlines could not have a direction despite them being the tale of a journey from one place to another. Hmmm - looks like I've argued against my own point. If you see a proper example songline text somewhere please get it in the article EdwardLane (talk) 09:02, 8 August 2011 (UTC)

This is an interesting discussion and I would like to see the article extended to contain far more or this sort of information (sourced by someone who knows about this). I came to this article knowing the basic definition of Songlines but hoping to learn about the actual structure of the songs and perhaps read about the cultural, historical or neurological differences between the development of oral versus pictorial type maps and information. Perhaps we need an editor here who is from an aboriginal background or an anthropologist, or preferably both?Anonymous watcher (talk) 10:50, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

Another thought would be whether someone has compiled a list of the words and tunes of all/most/some of the various songlines?

And could someone technically skilled put one 'good' example songline next to a map - with the actual music and words of the songline 'translated' and describe how it explains the ways to look at the terrain/locations of the example map. Perhaps it needs someone from Wikipedia:WikiProject Maps but no doubt they would need all the info first to build the map. EdwardLane (talk) 19:48, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

A good example (perhaps compared to a geographic pictorial map) would very much improve the article.Anonymous watcher (talk) 10:50, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

I could not agree more, a sound recording, with a transcription and a suitable map would I think convey the information best. If the beat of the music matters then it might want music notation too. I guess we'd ideally like more than one, if there are different types/qualities to different songlines, so that all the variety is described. EdwardLane (talk) 18:34, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

Hmm I've been trying to track down any online audio with descriptions of songlines, and I've grabbed a bunch of links that look like they could be used as references for this page, but at the moment they are all bare htmls, i think the later links are probably better, there is a map in one of the earlier links showing the dreaming tracks near a mining project, but it seems that the knowledge in the songlines is being kept private, so the songlines that go with the map are not labelled/described. I'm begining to think that is a generic cultural value difference - so perhaps the map/song/text may not be possible yet.

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] EdwardLane (talk) 11:53, 17 February 2013 (UTC)

New Documentary on Songlines

the headline for this article says "Songlines that criss-cross Australia televised as a series for the first time" - that's been broadcast, so that might well prove one of the most useful resources for this article. The article above contains some implications already that change my perceptions of songlines - artifacts required for some dances for example. EdwardLane (talk) 08:37, 19 June 2017 (UTC)

@EdwardLane: I'd imagine it will be screened on NINTV (and, perhaps, ABC). When you find out when it's going to be on, I'd appreciate a ping so's I don't miss it. I did as much reading on the subject as I could find at that time (years ago), but recent documentaries ("First Footsteps", et al) have provided a far better insight into fuller meaning of the concept. Cheers for the heads up! --Iryna Harpy (talk) 22:26, 18 July 2017 (UTC)