Songlines: A Counter-Mapping of the Indigenous Australian Self in Alexis Wright’s Novel Carpentaria and the International Itinerant Exhibition Songlines
Abstract
In Australia, Songlines criss-cross the continent, telling of its story and the deep connection between Indigenous peoples and “Country”—the holistic Aboriginal worldview. This cultural mapping becomes a counter-mapping of the Indigenous self, which is unfathomable to outsiders, unless they are initiated to the stories that form the Songline. Songlines are at the heart of both works that form the corpus of this paper: Carpentaria, Alexis Wright’s novel published in 2006, and the international itinerant exhibition entitled Songlines, showcased at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, produced by the National Museum of Australia with the constant collaboration of Indigenous Australian communities. This paper demonstrates how Songlines function as a structural and narrative principle in the corpus, allowing outsiders—whether they be non-Indigenous readers or visitors—to navigate the spaces of the novel and the exhibition while remapping Indigenous epistemological sovereignty.
Résumé
Les Songlines traversent le continent australien, racontant son histoire et la connexion profonde entre les peuples autochtones et “Country” – la vision autochtone du monde holistique. Cette cartographie culturelle devient une contre-cartographie du soi aborigène, incompréhensible pour les étrangers, à moins qu'ils ne soient initiés aux histoires qui forment la Songline. Les Songlines sont au cœur des deux œuvres qui constituent le corpus de cet article : Carpentaria, le roman d'Alexis Wright publié en 2006, et l'exposition itinérante internationale intitulée Songlines, présentée au Musée du Quai Branly à Paris, produite par le Musée National d'Australie en collaboration constante avec les communautés autochtones australiennes. Cet article démontre comment les Songlines fonctionnent comme principe structurel et narratif dans le corpus, permettant aux lecteurs non-autochtones ou aux visiteurs de naviguer dans les espaces du roman et de l'exposition tout en réaffirmant la souveraineté épistémologique autochtone.
Texte intégral
First Nations peoples should be aware that this article contains names of people who have passed away.
Introduction
“[The Martu people] don’t need maps,” writes Margo Neale, Lead Indigenous Curator of the Songlines exhibition. Indeed, Songlines comprehend much more than the two-dimensional Western concept of maps as artist Kim Mahood explains: “They [the Martu, Indigenous Australians] are the map, all of them custodians of the interlocking story that is Martu Country” 1 . Lynne Kelly, co-writer of Songlines: the Power and Promise with Margo Neale, adds: “[The Songlines] weave across the entire nation and exist in a more multidimensional way than a line that can be measured in kilometres. It is impossible to travel all the Songlines as the area they cover is too vast” 2 . From those quotes, one can already picture the cultural importance and complexity of that vast network of knowledge that is kept by the custodians of the Songlines, because Indigenous Australians do not “own the land; the land owns them. They are the custodians with the responsibility to care for Country” 3 . Indigenous Australians are the map, to the extent that Neale conceives the Songlines as “a master archive” in which “humans are documents, archived according to kin, knowledge and ancestral relations to places” 4 .
During the invasion and colonisation of Australia, European explorers and settlers named the places they thought they “discovered,” not realising that they were already well-mapped and recorded. Indigenous Australians have had to live with foreign names and cartography ever since. European mapping inscribed the frontier within the Australian territory itself: the centre 5 was then considered as impossible to explore, to survive in, and to know, going against the very idea of Songlines crisscrossing the continent, in which the desert is not envisioned as a frontier, but rather as another place full of life and of stories. Over time, tentative European definitions regularly failed to fathom the depth of what Songlines stand for. Maybe the most well-known is that of Bruce Chatwin in his best-selling book The Songlines (1987), in which he coined the term. Although critics decried Chatwin’s work 6 , it was still met with public acclaim. However, his definition of Songlines indulges in oversimplification, as they are described as “a labyrinth of invisible pathways which meander all over Australia and are known to Europeans as ‘Dreaming-tracks’ or ‘Songlines’” 7 : no real mention is made of their spiritual or epistemological importance and their deep connection to Country, identity and culture is eluded.
Consequently, the definition of “Songlines” given by Margo Neale will be the theoretical ground on which the rest of this article will be based:
Songlines are archives held in Country […], a knowledge system—a way of retaining and transmitting knowledge—that is archived or held in the land. They can be visualised as corridors or pathways of knowledge, like Dreaming tracks. 8
The Songlines exhibition aimed at reinscribing at the centre of the museum the diversity and complexity of the Songlines, deeply anchored in the experience of Country. This exhibition was produced and then displayed in the National Museum of Australia (14/09/2017 – 28/02/2018) and at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris (04/04/23–02/07/23) 9 . The curation of such an exhibition was made possible thanks to the constant collaboration of Indigenous Australian communities, represented by “a community curatorium,” composed of the senior custodians of the Seven Sisters Songlines 10 . Visitors walk through three different deserts to follow the Seven Sisters who try to escape from a lustful man, called Wati Nyiru. Songlines also play an important role in Alexis Wright’s seminal novel Carpentaria (2006), in which the whole worldmaking evolves around “Dreaming tracks,” from the very creation of the Gulf of Carpentaria in the first chapter to the protagonists’ journeys and specific arcs. Protagonist Normal Phantom possesses a strong sea knowledge that his son, Will, will acquire during his own personal quest trying to find his wife and son. In both works (the novel and the exhibition), Songlines become a cultural counter-mapping of the Indigenous self, inconceivable by outsiders, unless they are initiated to the stories that inform them.
Drawing from literary critical studies as well as Indigenous and museum studies, this transdisciplinary comparative research paper aims to focus on the treatment of narratives, under the form of the Songline, and their transmedial representations and transmissions. This paper demonstrates how Songlines imply a specific process of transmission that is an intrinsic part of this cultural, spiritual and ontological mapping. This paper will first explore the constant interweaving of orality, visuality and textuality in the representations of Songlines in both works under scrutiny, before considering their deep anchoring in the experience of Country. Finally, the Songlines seem to function as a structural and narrative principle, allowing outsiders—whether they be non-Indigenous readers or visitors—to navigate the spaces of the novel and the exhibition while remapping Indigenous epistemological sovereignty.
Representing Songlines: A Multi-Dimensional Mapping
At the Crossroads of Orality, Visuality and Textuality
Lynne Kelly’s definition of the Songline emphasizes the importance of performance and of orality, which are the key elements of what she calls an “embodied knowledge system:”
Indigenous cultures have an alternative to conventional literacy known as orality, a way of archiving knowledge in the landscape, activated through performance. It is therefore preferable to refer to such cultures as ‘oral’. Songlines are the chief vehicle of orality. 11
Carpentaria features this oral transmission of the Songlines, when elder Joseph Midnight shares his knowledge with Will in order to help him find his way at sea:
The old man gave him the directions to the safe place in his far-off country – a blow-by-blow description sung in song, unravelling a map to a Dreaming place he had never seen. […] Yet, old man Midnight remembered a ceremony he had never performed in his life before, and now, to his utter astonishment, he passed it on to Will. 12
As paradoxical as it may seem for western readers, this specific knowledge of unknown places has become an intrinsic part of the elder, to the point that he did not know he knew it. Neale likens this practice to “indexing,” which she defines as “[t]he use of songs to call up Country. […] Singing Country can locate places previously unknown by the singer” 13 . This is what happens with Joseph Midnight, whose performance perfectly illustrates the complex and immense mapping encompassed in such a Songline: “he was singing in the right sequence hundreds of places in a journey to a place at least a thousand kilometres away […]. [T]he song was so long and complicated and had to be remembered in the right sequence” 14 . The song itself follows patterns, with a specific rhythm which resonates through textual repetitions:
‘Sing this time. Only that place called such and such. This way, remember. Don’t mix it up. Then next place, sing, such and such. Listen to me sing it now and only when the moon is above, like there, bit lower, go on, practice. Remember, don’t make mistakes…’ 15
Here, the performative dimension of the imperatives and the elisions (“such and such,” “…”) associated with the network of repetitions aim at expressing the vastness of the song, which keeps expanding out of the narration itself.
The same focus on orality and on the importance of transmission is at the core of the Songlines exhibition. Sounds, songs, and words guide the visitor-listener throughout different spaces. In front of the masterpiece of the exhibition—the painting entitled Yarrkalpa/Hunting Ground—the visitor is invited to enter a small a room made of screens which show different angles of the outdoor workshop, and they can watch the painting being created by the collective of artists.
Figure 1. Always Walking Country: Parnngurr Yarrkalpa”, Lynette Wallworth, immersive installation (sound, song, painting and animated image), Musée du Quai Branly, personal photograph, June 2023
The song they sing enables the visitor to associate the painting to the Songline: the oral and the visual cannot be separated and both participate into the transmission of the Songline. Songs and paintings are thus connected through ceremony, as Neale continues:
Songs were learnt “as people travelled to the places named in the song and the rhythm of walking took the song into the body. Through the body, song became dance, which in turn became ceremony.” Painted with the signs of the ancestral beings being sung, the dancing body unlocked the knowledge of the master archive. The contemporary practice of painting on canvas derives from body painting and is an extension of such archival practices. 16
Painting partakes in the ceremony as much as the song itself, linking also physically the people to the ceremony, through performance. In the exhibition, another dimension is added, that of the textual, since the translation of what the elders tell the visitors can be read on the same screens, in different languages. Orality, textuality and visuality are interwoven on the walls and the panels where explanations are given: the Songline is written above but orality is visualized through the writing itself.
Figure 2. “Afin____que tou s____pu iss e n t le v oir”, exhibition wall, personal photograph, June 2023
The font includes dashes and spaces that vary in length which may be interpreted as the visual transcription of breath, complementing sound. If, as Ong recalls, orality can dispense with literacy, the written text cannot do the same with orality 17 , and this is typically what seems to happen in the exhibition and in the novel itself, in which writing stages and enhances orality.
The Archi-Texture of Knowledge
As Neale calls it, the “master archive” whose knowledge is unlocked by the song follows specific sequences, categories and ways of correctly singing it. The complexity of this system of knowledge is best illustrated in the novel by the architecture of specific features of the landscape that inform the Songline, articulating that complexity on a visual and on a textual level—what we call the “archi-textual”. This archi-texture relies on layering: cognitive and sensory layers overlap, until the system of knowledge becomes a complex network which takes different forms in the novel. The Songline aimed at helping Norm navigate the sea shapes the currents into a complex architecture:
Through his exhausted mind rolled an incoherent jumble of pictures, of guiding stars, sea currents flowing from all points of the compass, crossing the route of the sun. He grabbed from the forest of stars, selecting gliding currents from bundles of spears, and sun rays stacked for choosing as he began plotting, jigsawing bit by bit to form an imaginary nautical map for the journey back to Desperance. […] He slept fitfully, forced to a state of wakeful consciousness sifting and sorting time, place and current. 18
One may note here the change in paradigm from a “jumble of pictures, of guiding stars, sea currents,” to a careful process of selection and “indexing” (“selecting,” “plotting,” “jigsawing,” “sorting”) that becomes a bodily performance as the verb of action, “grabbed,” shows. In the end, the cumulated generational knowledge of the Songline superimposes itself on sea Country, “the history of his knowledge crisscrossing itself until it formed a watery spider web, a polygon structure tangled with all of the local currents he ever knew in his mind, all tracks leading home” 19 . Songlines do not only map Country, but also “sea Country,” involving thus different planes of materiality, connecting them, adding layers that complexify the constant worldmaking process that they generate.
Different layers are also to be found on the paintings displayed in the Songlines exhibition: the diversity of shapes and colours form symbols whose meaning have to be explained to a non-initiated visitor. The masterpiece of the exhibition, entitled Yarrkalpa/ Hunting Ground is described in the catalogue as conveying encyclopaedic knowledge, as its details are so rich. Its pencil sketch is displayed on the wall directly facing it, in order to help the visitor make sense of it.
Figure 3. Yarrkalpa (Hunting Ground), Kumpaya Girgirba, Yikartu Bumba, Kanu Nancy Taylor, Ngamaru Bidu, Janice Yuwali Nixon, Reena Rogers, Thelma Judson and Ngalangka Nola Taylor, 2013, Acrylic on canvas, 300 x 500 cm, personal photograph, June 2023
Figure 4. Yarrkalpa (Hunting Ground), sketch on tracing paper, Kim Mahood, 2013, personal photograph, June 2023
In addition, knowledge is accessible only through layers, since part of this knowledge is too sacred to be shared with non-Indigenous people. Kelly delineates the different layers of accessibility: she explains that, quite similarly, Indigenous children have restricted access to the details of the Songline, and states that “[i]t is only by restricting knowledge that the Songlines have been maintained so accurately over such periods of time” 20 . In the exhibition, knowledge is not only multi-dimensional (oral, textual, visual) or multi-layered, it is also multi-medial, as it is represented through different media, adding but another layer of complexity. The exhibition mostly displays paintings but they are combined with grass sculptures representing the Seven Sisters, as well as spears, vases and films. Additionally, the scenography of the exhibition relies on a specific architecture, its key feature being the 360° dome, in which the visitors can watch the whole escape of the Seven Sisters. To the complexity of the concept of Songlines and of the network of knowledge that it includes should be added the importance of Country in its understanding, as both Country and Songlines are deeply interconnected and even can be said to sustain each other.
An Experience Deeply Furrowed in Country
Storytelling and the Breath of Country
In Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong writes that sound “exists only when it is going out of existence. It is not simply perishable but essentially evanescent, and it is sensed as evanescent. […] The oral utterance has vanished as soon as it is uttered” 21 . However, one may argue that it is not entirely true when it comes to Songlines as they are “embodied” knowledge, deeply anchored in Country and existing through Country. Songlines remain in Country until reactivated through their performance. Sound is but the portal to the resulting embodied knowledge contained in the Songline, itself ingrained in Country, which in return is its essence. As such, sound never really dies away, since Country is alive and constantly breathing. This could be one interpretation of the written excerpts of the Songline at the top of the exhibition’s walls, which use a specific font interspersed with dashes of different lengths: Country is speaking for itself, and sound and breath are thus reconfigured and visualized through writing, enabling them to be preserved.
In the same vein, Geoff Rodoreda argues that “[Wright] challenges Western notions of orality’s deficiencies, such as the idea that it lacks historical exactitude, durability or longevity” 22 . Indeed, the prevalence and permanence of breath and sound emanating from Country structure the first pages of Wright’s novel, describing the Gulf of Carpentaria coming to life through the breath of the ancestral serpent:
This tidal river snake of flowing mud takes in breaths of a size that is difficult to comprehend. Imagine the serpent’s breathing rhythms as the tide flows inland, edging towards the spring waters nestled deeply in the gorges of an ancient limestone plateau covered with rattling grasses dried yellow from the prevailing winds. Then with the outward breath, the tide turns and the serpent flows back to its own circulating mass of shallow waters in the giant water basin in a crook of the mainland whose sides separate it from the open sea. 23
In this excerpt, the breath of the ancestral serpent merges with the ebb and flow of waters, until they become one and the same thing, coming in and out of the mainland, following the tides. However, ancestral breath does not only “permeate everything,” 24 it propels the novel itself, becoming the narrating breath, engaging with storytelling and addressing the readers throughout the book. Geoff Rodoreda, who offers an extensive study of orality in Carpentaria, explains that the narrative’s treatment of orality “mimics aspects of oral performance,” relying on “narratorial simulations of breath intake, exasperation, wonderment, and affirmation of the story’s ‘truth’[…]” 25 . Rodoreda asserts that Carpentaria’s frame narrative is told by an Aboriginal communal voice to white or non-Aboriginal people—a process which recalls the exhibition’s own scenography featuring the screens on which the visitors can see and listen to the life-sized representations of elders telling them the Songline 26 .
Figure 5. Ngalangka Nola Taylor, Martu guide, Musée du Quai Branly, personal photograph, June 2023
Country thrives on its intrinsic connection with its people, and to keep it strong, they tell and sing its stories, which reciprocally enables them to survive 27 . In her article, the Goenpul author and activist Aileen Moreton-Robinson contrasts the Western way of possessing land, that she calls “the white possessive,” to the “sense of belonging” that is the structuring principle of Indigenous people’s connection to Country:
Indigenous people’s sense of belonging is derived from an ontological relationship to country derived from the Dreaming which provides the precedents for what is believed to have occurred in the beginning in the original form of social living created by ancestral beings. During the Dreaming, ancestral beings created the land and life and they are tied to particular tracks of country. […] The ontological relationship occurs through the intersubstantiation of ancestral beings, humans, and land—it is a form of embodiment. As the descendants and reincarnation of these ancestral beings, Indigenous people derive their sense of belonging to country through and from them. 28
This “intersubstantiation,” as embodiment, intrinsically binds Country and people, connecting ancestral beings still present in the Songlines (“tracks of country”) and their descendants. Country is thus also considered as alive, because those ancestral beings still inhabit it and keep living through it. In Carpentaria, the narration periodically inscribes the presence of the ancestral beings in Country and physically relates it to its people:
When the mud dried…
Claypans breathed like skin, and you could feel it, right inside the marrow of your bones. The old people said it was the world stirring itself, right down to the sea. Sometimes, in Desperance, everyone heard the drying mud crack in the vast claypans. You could hear the ground groaning, splitting its epidermis into channels of deep cuts all across the ground. It looked like a fisherman’s net, except it was red brown, and it trapped whatever was down below from breaking through to the surface. It made you think that whatever it was living down underneath your feet, was much bigger than you, and that gave them old clan folk real power. 29
This passage shows that after the modelling through water and mud in the first pages of the novel, this embodiment of Country goes as far as featuring a body of its own, that lives, breathes and groans. This organic description of Country illustrates the “intersubstantiation” mentioned by Moreton-Robinson, transcribed in the narration through the expression “you could feel it, right inside the marrow of your bones.” Songlines, or “songspirals” 30 , as the Gay’wu Group of Women call them, further indicates this deep emerging or ongoing ontological connection between people and Country:
Songspirals are maps, but they are more than maps too. They are about how a person and a clan connect and relate with and as Country, how people and Country are always emerging in relationship with each other. Everything within Country is alive and sentient and people are part of this vibrance. So the songspirals, which bring Country into existence, are deeply connected to people. It is a profoundly deep connection, much more than a lifestyle. 31
First, although Songlines resemble maps, they should not be just reduced to a two-dimensional document as they reach out to include and relate people to Country. Just as the Songlines are ongoing narratives, the connection between people and Country or people “as Country” is said to be “emerging,” that is to say ongoing and continuous, unfolding towards the future as it always had been, “from time immemorial” 32 . Country is alive for the people it encompasses, but also for the agency that is attributed to it in this holistic worldview, still inhabited by the ancestral beings that modelled it.
Everything and Everywhen: An All-Encompassing Worldview
Whereas Western mapping is about delineating frontiers and separating countries, defining territorial ownership, different worlds coalesce to make one whole in the Indigenous Australian worldview: “Space is everywhere and time is everywhen” writes Kelly 33 . Indeed, multiple times collide and superimpose, “from time immemorial” 34 to the present of the visit, and the future of the ongoing Songline, making it “everywhen” 35 . “Everywhere” encompasses Country, sea Country and sky, while “everywhen” refers to a temporal layering that inscribes the Songlines in a continuous temporality from ancient past to distant future. This partakes in what Neale calls a “network of connectivity” 36 , which operates as the structuring principle of both the exhibition and the novel under study.
Deemed as “heterotopias of indefinitely accumulating time” by Michel Foucault 37 , museums lead their visitors to walk through different places and times. The visitors of the Songlines exhibition cross numerous Australian deserts and even enter one artist’s workshop. This passage from one place to another within one same space, that of the museum, culminates in the technological asset of this exhibition, used to immerse the visitors in the Songline of the Seven Sisters: the 360° dome, made of screens on which a short movie is projected, embarks the visitors on a journey starting in the cave where the wall-paintings telling the story of the Seven Sisters were discovered. Then the visitors go on an artistic voyage, following the grass sculptures representing the Sisters in their tentative escape from Wati Nyiru, before observing their flight into the starry sky, where they transform into the Pleiades.
Figure 6. “Travelling Kungkarangkalpa”, installation dome, Musée du Quai Branly, personal photograph, June 2023
This exhibition functions as the paragon of the museum as heterotopia since it operates as a specific space including all those places within its walls: the scenography pushes back the walls of the exhibition, reconfigured as a portal to other worlds. From the desert to the sky, the Seven Sisters Songline takes the visitors from one environment to another which are but the continuity of each other.
Similarly, Alexis Wright advocates this holistic worldview while reflecting on her writing, explaining she wanted to write “a novel capable of embracing all times” 38 and “expressing an Aboriginality of place,” 39 which would be part of “a literature growing out of the country itself” 40 . In her words, Carpentaria “attempts to portray the world of Indigenous Australia as being in constant opposition between different spaces of time. Time is represented by the resilience of ancient beliefs overlaying the inherited experience of colonial experience” 41 . The coining of the expression “spaces of time” quite tellingly illustrates the fusion of space and time, which strikingly contrasts with the bakhtinian chronotope ruling the contemporary Western novel. Once more, Indigenous Australian worldview models another cartography altogether, and this inspired Wright when writing her novel: “This is how I believe Aboriginal people see time and place as being interconnected and related, and encompassing all times and realities […]” 42 . This holistic worldview informs the narration of Carpentaria: one of its most striking examples is Norm’s sea knowledge that enables him to navigate for months, even possibly years, and to find his way home. His travels lead him to “sea country” 43 , which he “walks” 44 as he would walk Country, since environments are not distinct or separated, forming thus “a world without end” 45 . Nautical and starry itineraries intertwine during Norm’s journey at sea. The sky and the sea mirror each other, one reflecting the surface of the other, enabling the gropers to cross from one ocean to the other and to keep swimming in the waters of the Milky Way. The gropers entertain a special connection with protagonist Norm who is the custodian of their Songline:
As each group moved upwards, they surfaced loudly in volumes of water, raising their bodies high out of the sea, which was splashing down like waterfalls behind them. The creatures did not stop when they reached the highest level they could before falling back into the sea. Norm wiped their salty spray from his face, as he studied them swimming through the ocean of air, to ascend into the sky world of the Milky Way. They became specks in the sky until they were so far away in the distance, they were a cloudy blur in the celestial heavens of stars and spirits. 46
This connection between sea and sky occurs thanks to the vertical movement that pervades the excerpt, with expressions such as “moved upwards,” “raising… high out,” “ascend,” but also thanks to changes in scale and elements that progressively merge. The readers follow Norm’s gaze, designed as a prism which enables the passage from “spray” to “specks,” from the liquidity of the sea to this new ocean that is the aerial dimension of the sky, until the gropers fade away, as “a cloudy blur.” Norm then watches them drift away, after their celestial metamorphosis: “[he] […] caught a glimpse of the fish become stars shooting back in the skies, and finally, the night caravan moving further and further away on its journey” 47 . Just like the Seven Sisters whose journey is represented on the screens that line the 360° dome, the gropers’ itinerary starts in sea Country and ends up in the sky, transforming into stars and following a Songline of their own and partaking in Indigenous epistemological sovereignty.
The Third Archive: Mapping Indigenous Epistemological Sovereignty
Indigenous Agency and Sovereignty
In On Longing, Susan Stewart explains how collecting and, one may think, the subsequent curating of exhibitions construct narratives of the self: “Each sign is placed in relation to a chain of signifiers whose ultimate referent is not the interior of the room – in itself an empty essence – but the interior of the self” 48 . However, the display of knowledge in ethnographic museums, as colonial institutions by excellence, had rarely been co-constructed, let alone solely relegated to its traditional custodians as is the case with the Songlines exhibition: at worst Indigenous peoples were completely silenced, at best they were recognized as mere “informants” in the curating process of ethnographic exhibitions about their own communities. On the contrary, the members of the community curatorium transmit their knowledge, while they virtually accompany the visitors throughout the exhibition. The Songlines exhibition enables the visitors to walk the Songline, as a portal to the community curatorium’s Country: as its custodians, they re-mapped the Songline as embodied knowledge of Country in the exhibition. However, whereas Stewart argues that “in order to construct this narrative of interiority it is necessary to obliterate the object’s context of origin” 49 , the exhibition follows its own path and becomes self-referring since it comes to embody the very context of origin of the displayed objects. Indeed, it represents Country and even acquires a performative dimension:
The Songlines exhibition is consciously conceived and curatorially organised as another kind of embodied experience where the participants/viewers can vicariously experience walking the Seven Sisters songline. This hybrid model of knowledge from the master archive held in country is accessible via the Western-style exhibition with a performative inma dimension. 50
Songlines are not only songs but performances (inma), leading the custodians to gain agency thanks to an unprecedented association of Western curatorial and conservative practices with Indigenous Australian knowledge, or what Neal calls the “Third Archive,” cared for by “artist-archivists” 51 . They help build a “living library” whose “arch- or Ancestral archivists placed this knowledge in the earth” 52 . The same imagery pervades Carpentaria, where Norm takes on both roles: that of “arch-archivist,” and that of “artist-archivist” since he “performs” the embodied knowledge of Country while stuffing fishes in his workshop, making them look as if they were alive:
This was the time when there was total silence in the workshop. Norm painted, and the children watched over his shoulder, at the miracle he performed restoring the original colours with paints he made from ochre and plants. These, he said, were mixed using the secret measurements of life, and pearl shell crushed into a fine powder. All his painted fish possessed a translucent gleam of under-the-sea iridescence made from the movements of sun rays running through the wind currents. 53
In this excerpt, a few elements that have already previously been mentioned are present: the idea of performance, almost of a ceremony (“the miracle he performed”), of knowledge as being embodied in Country, even taking the colour of Country here (“using the secret measurements of life, and pearl shell crushed into a fine powder”), and of the connection between sky and ocean (“sun rays running through the wind currents”). As an artist, Norm becomes an agent of such a knowledge, while performing the song.
Art as knowledge
Earlier in the book, Norm was presented as a knowledgeable artist: in the novel and the exhibition, art is considered as a way of knowing, whether it be through the singing and danced performance of the Songlines, or the paintings that are derived from such performances. Margo Neale further defines the work of the “archivist,” working with the archive of Country:
As with all archives, the archivist doesn’t just guard the archive: they interpret and add to it, engaging creatively with it to keep it alive, or to keep its knowledge relevant and active in the present. […] [T]he Aboriginal archivist – whom we often know as the artist or maker, both inadequate Western terms – activates the knowledge embedded in a site by carrying some part of that knowledge to the site and carrying away an enhanced experience of that knowledge. A kind of mutual knowledge transfer occurs between place, person and history. 54
Knowledge and art intermingle, to the extent that art teaches or conveys knowledge related to Country, thanks to experience. Art works as a prism through which knowledge is shared: “Art is culture made visible […]. [It] has been an integral component of the knowledge system” 55 . In Carpentaria, Norm is of course the privileged figure of the artist, but other instances of artistic visions and practices are scattered throughout the novel, always related to Country somehow, which is itself depicted for example as the “country’s blue, green and red paintbox landscape” 56 . When zealot Mozzie Fishman looks for the ancestral cave where he and his devotees will bury the three little petrol-sniffers who died in custody, the depiction of the cave recalls the representation of another cave, the one in which the Seven Sisters Songline is painted, projected in the 360° dome in the middle of the Songlines exhibition. The description of the cave in the novel stages another representation of Songlines which enhances once again the connection between painting, narratives, Country and mapping: “Inside, the walls were covered by ancestral paintings telling stories of human history, made and remade by ochre paints, as the forefathers whispered the charter of their land” 57 . This quote echoes quite a few ideas that have already been mentioned in this study, while adding another important concept, that of the assumed Western dichotomy between “history” and “story,” which is rebuffed by Indigenous epistemologies. Here, art represents stories that tell “human history.” Indeed, according to Neale and following Aboriginal worldview, “the term ‘history’ is interchangeable with the term ‘story’ (from which it derives), but story carries more weight in the Aboriginal world, as history does in the Western world” 58 .
Whether it be writing, painting or singing Country, all artistic practices are encapsulated in that process of cognitive transmission, and become accepted as “ways of knowing,” as termed by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, encompassing them in what he calls the “ecology of knowledges” 59 . In this case, art as a way of knowing mobilizes all senses and consequently grounds knowledge in a profound and direct experience. Margo Neale transfers the holistic Indigenous Australian worldview to the conception of knowledge:
One of the most educative and moving ways of teaching all Australians about the foundational history of this country is through the arts: visual art, music, performance and writing. Aboriginal ways of being and knowing have enhanced all of these disciplines, and can help make the arts more experiential, immersive and holistic, involving all the senses. 60
Arts and the resulting sensory experience are what leads to the transmission of the embodied knowledge of Country. All arts that are the core principles of the works under scrutiny are evoked as other pathways towards meaning and knowledge. Painting cannot be separated from performance as the video of the painting ceremony of Yarrkalpa/ Hunting Ground shows: the performative dimension (inma) is also primordial in the reactivation of knowledge, that is shown in the video projected on the screen of the small room facing the wall on which the master-painting of the Songlines exhibition is on display. The female artists sing during the whole length of the artistic process as one can hear while standing in the cube walled with the screens showing a vertical view of the outdoor workshop where they painted Yarrkalpa/ Hunting Ground. The visitors face a multi-sensory experience of the artistic process of creation of the painting, as they are immersed in sight and sound, surrounded by the images and the voices of the artists. Reminiscing on the genealogy of the Yarrkalpa artistic project, Neale comments that while watching the “footage of the ten-day painting process compressed into forty minutes, you are left in no doubt that what you are witnessing is ceremony on canvas” 61 . Once more, Songlines, painting and Country merge during the ceremony, bringing the artists in the ceremonial tracks as well as the visitors: “through this experience of seeing the canvas being painted, we feel the breathing, living surface become Country” 62 .
Conclusion
In Carpentaria, museums do not fare well: under the guise of “local tourist attractions” 63 , these mausoleums display “mummified Egyptians” or
old bones which had lain with the ancestors for millions of years, [and which] were being stuck together again with araldite and wire, and covered with fur so all Australians could visit them in museums to see what these creatures [=the gropers] used to look like. 64
The display of remains clearly inscribes the museums in the past, as museums of colonial horrors that will never be recognized. Similarly, Uncle Micky’s “collection of cartridges […] used in the massacre of local tribes” 65 are proofs mapping the colonial history in Country, but no tourists visit it. Indigenous Australians are absent from these colonial epistemologies: “neither Normal Phantom and his family, nor his family’s relations, past or present, rated a mention in the official version of the region’s history. There was no tangible evidence of their existence.” 66 Desperance’s “museum of scarce memorabilia” contrasts with the representation of the “libraries” embedded in Country and of the embodied knowledge of Songlines.
The Songlines exhibition departs from such representations of museums: as part of the “third archive” combining features of Western technology with Indigenous knowledges, the exhibition works as a bridge which also partakes in linking the local with the global. Wright advocates for a planetary vision deeply anchored in the local which defines what she terms “Aboriginal cosmopolitanism:” “this holds the most importance to me, of belonging to this total world, yet one that relates to the worlds of others” 67 . Two members of the community curatorium, Ngalangka Nola Taylor and Kumpaya Girgirba, also underline this universal dimension of the story:
It is not only a songline – they [the Seven Sisters] have travelled all around Australia. And even people who live in foreign countries know the story of the Seven Sisters one way or another, it is thus a story that is very special. It does not only take place here, in Australia, but also everywhere else. 68
Lastly, the novel’s and the exhibition’s international acclaim participates in the universalism of this access to knowledge, which is facilitated by the fact that this story belongs to all Australians:
From the outset of the exhibition, the elders were very clear about why all Australians need to know about the Songlines. If you want to truly belong to this country, you have to know your story about this place, this continent and its creation. It was about teaching you your stories, not just sharing ours – otherwise, you won’t take root and belong. 69
These Songlines even extend out of the Australian national frontier: from the National Museum of Australia to the Musée du Quai Branly in France, from the Miles Franklin Literary Award 70 to the novel’s selection as part of the syllabus of the French “agrégation” 71 , the Songlines eventually reach out to audiences that were uninitiated. However, thanks to the guidance of the elders, both the exhibition and the novel work as an initiation for most visitors and readers, mapping new ways of knowing. Neale concludes on the purpose of the exhibition and on its impact on visitors, which marks its success: “the gallery became Country and visitors become travellers and initiates, learning as real initiates do, travelling the Songlines and being taught by elders who guided their journey. Paintings functioned as gateways to sites on Country that hold the knowledge, much like libraries” 72 . The exhibition also changes the purpose of the museum here, which becomes not a “rite” but a “site of passage” for visitors, and the same applies for the novel and its readers, who go through the initiation process when reading. Both offer an intricate representation of Songlines which does not adhere to the Western definition of maps, as this paper has demonstrated. Songlines attest to the unmistakable link between Country and people: allying visuality, textuality and orality, they work as transmedial ways of knowing, while asserting Indigenous epistemological sovereignty.
[[40]]Ibid.Alexis Wright, “On Writing Carpentaria”, cit., p. 230.[[41]]
- John Carty et al., We Don’t Need a Map: A Martu Experience of the Western Desert, Fremantle Arts Centre, Fremantle, WA, 2013, p. 41.↵
- She specifies that “[t]he massive Australian continent is overwritten by a mesh of complex Songlines covering nearly 8 million square kilometres. Each section is maintained and controlled by the local traditional owners but also shared when appropriate”. Lynne Kelly and Margo Neale, Songlines: The Power and Promise, Thames and Hudson, 2023, p. 77.↵
- Ibid., p. 79. The word “Country” refers to the holistic, all-encompassing Indigenous Australian worldview, which does not only signify the land, but also all the fauna and flora, the people inhabiting it, their activities and ceremonies, the sky, the sea, the seasons as well as the past, present and future.↵
- Ibid., p. 42.↵
- For further details on the Australian centre as a frontier, see Glenn Morrison, “Walking, Frontier and Nation: Re/tracing the Songlines in Central Australian Literature,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 40/1, 2019, p. 118-140.↵
- It was mainly due to the book’s confusion in genres as well as cultural generalisations.↵
- Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines, London, Pan Books, 1987, p. 2. The “Dreaming”, or Tjukurrpa, is another way of referring to songlines and their inscription on Country.↵
- Lynne Kelly and Margo Neale, op. cit., p. 45.↵
- Before arriving in France, this international touring exhibition was shown in Perth (Western Australian Museum, 23/11/2020 – 26/04/2021), in the United Kingdom (The Box, Plymouth, 21/10/2021 – 27/02/2022) and in Germany (Humboldt Forum, Berlin, 17/06/2022 – 30/10/2022). It is currently exhibited in Finland (Museokeskus Vapriikki, Tampere, 11/10/2024 – 30/03/25).↵
- Margo Neale acknowledges Rene Kulitja; Alison Milyika Carroll; Tapaya Edwards; Brenda, Ronnie and Stanley Douglas; Josephine Mick; Anawari Inpiti Mitchell; Jennifer Nginyaka Mitchell; Muuki Taylor; Nola Taylor; Lalla West; and Inawinytji Williamson (the spokesperson for the community curatorium).↵
- Lynne Kelly and Margo Neale, op. cit., p. 66.↵
- Alexis Wright, Carpentaria, London, Constable, 2009, p. 360.↵
- Lynne Kelly and Margo Neale, op. cit., p. 46-47.↵
- Alexis Wright, op. cit., p. 360.↵
- Ibid., emphasis added.↵
- Lynne Kelly and Margo Neale, op. cit., p. 47, quoting John Carty et al., op. cit., p. 40.↵
- “Oral expression can exist and mostly has existed without any writing at all, writing never without orality.” See Walter Ong, op. cit., p. 8.↵
- Ibid., p. 244.↵
- Ibid.↵
- Lynne Kelly and Margo Neale, op. cit., p. 88.↵
- Walter Ong, op. cit., p. 32, 39.↵
- Geoff Rodoreda, “Orality and Narrative Invention in Carpentaria”, JASAL 16/2, 2016, p. 1.↵
- Alexis Wright, Carpentaria, cit., p. 2.↵
- Ibid., p. 2.↵
- Geoff Rodoreda, op. cit., p. 6. Emphasis added.↵
- Ibid., p. 6. For further detail on Carpentaria’s embedded narrative and the position of the non-Aboriginal listener, see Ibid., p. 8-9.↵
- For more details on the connection to survival, see Lynne Kelly and Margo Neale, op. cit., p. 14. Glenn Morrison called Songlines “the geography of survival.” See “A Flâneur in the Outback: Walking and Writing Frontier in Central Australia,” New Scholar: An International Journal of the Humanities, Creative Arts and Social Sciences 3/3, 2014, p. 57, 63.↵
- Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property Power and Indigenous Sovereignty, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2015, p. 11-12.↵
- Alexis Wright, Carpentaria, cit., p. 357.↵
- Neale defines “songspirals” as follows: “Instead of Songlines, some Yolŋu prefer the term ‘songspirals’, which travel over land, along freshwater rivers, and where the freshwater and saltwater meet.” Lynne Kelly and Margo Neale, op. cit., p. 103.↵
- Gay’wu Group of Women, Song Spirals: Sharing Women’s Wisdom of Country through Songlines, NSW, Allen & Unwin, 2019, p. 38.↵
- Alexis Wright, Carpentaria, cit., p. 1.↵
- Lynne Kelly and Margo Neale, op. cit., p. 77.↵
- Alexis Wright, Carpentaria, cit., p. 1.↵
- Kelly elaborates: “When we walk through an area of bush, we are walking in the present and most of our thoughts are in the present, even though we may consider the past and the future as we stroll along. Many Aboriginal people when they walk on Country, however, experience the past of the ancestors and every time span that has existed and will ever exist. Anthropologist WEH Stanner coined the expression ‘everywhen’ when he was grappling with this Aboriginal sense of time and place.” Lynne Kelly and Margo Neale, op. cit., p. 77.↵
- Lynne Kelly and Margo Neale, op. cit., p. 31.↵
- Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16/1, 1986, p. 26.↵
- Alexis Wright, “On Writing Carpentaria,” op. cit., p. 228.↵
- Alexis Wright, “A Journey in Writing Place”, Meanjin, winter 2019, online.↵
- ↵
- Alexis Wright, “The Ancient Library and a Self-Governing Literature”, Sydney Review of Books, June 2019, online.↵
- Alexis Wright, Carpentaria, cit., p. 360. For a detailed definition, see Gay’wu Group of Women, op. cit., p. 42: “Our connections are to the land and to the sea too. Sea is part of Country. We call this Sea Country. We belong to the sea and the sea belong to us, just as with the land. We don’t see any clear distinction between land and sea, rivers and mangroves, earth and sky; they are all connected through relationships. That is the basis of our authority, our land rights and sea rights.”↵
- Alexis Wright, Carpentaria, cit., p. 244.↵
- Ibid., p. 248.↵
- Ibid., p. 246.↵
- Ibid.↵
- Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Durham, Duke University Press, 1993, p. 158.↵
- Ibid.↵
- Margo Neale and National Museum of Australia, Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters, Canberra, National Museum of Australia Press, 2017, p. 205.↵
- Ibid.↵
- Ibid., p. 204.↵
- Alexis Wright, Carpentaria, cit., p. 188.↵
- Lynne Kelly and Margo Neale, op. cit., p. 51.↵
- Ibid., p. 112.↵
- Alexis Wright, Carpentaria, cit., p. 175.↵
- Ibid., p. 174.↵
- Lynne Kelly and Margo Neale, op. cit., p. 37.↵
- Boaventura de Sousa Santos defines the “ecology of knowledges” as “the recognition of the copresence of different ways of knowing and the need to study the affinities, divergences, complementarities, and contradictions among them in order to maximize the effectiveness of the struggles of resistance against oppression.” See Boaventura de Sousa Santos, The End of the Cognitive Empire, The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South, Durham, Duke University Press, 2018, p. 8.↵
- Lynne Kelly and Margo Neale, op. cit., p. 37.↵
- Ibid., p. 51-52.↵
- Ibid., p. 52.↵
- Alexis Wright, Carpentaria, cit., p. 11.↵
- Ibid., p. 237.↵
- Ibid., p. 10.↵
- Ibid.↵
- Alexis Wright, “The Power and Purpose of Literature: Boisbouvier Oration 2018,” Meanjin, summer 2018, online.↵
- Margo Neale and Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac (Paris), Songlines: Chant des pistes du désert australien, Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, El Viso, 2023, p. 12, my translation of: “Ce n’est pas seulement une songline – elles [les Sept Soeurs] ont voyagé dans toute l’Australie. Et même des gens qui vivent dans des pays lointains connaissent l’histoire des Sept Sœurs d’une façon ou d’une autre, c’est donc une histoire très spéciale. Qui ne se passe pas seulement ici, en Australie, mais aussi partout ailleurs.”↵
- Lynne Kelly and Margo Neale, op. cit., p. 38-39.↵
- The Miles Franklin award is the Australian literary award offering the highest prize money, created through the will of Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin and first awarded in 1957.↵
- The “agrégation” is the highest French competitive exam specializing in one subject (here, English studies) and giving access to teaching positions in French high school system. Carpentaria was part of the syllabus for the 2022 and 2023 “agrégation” sessions.↵
- Lynne Kelly and Margo Neale, op. cit., p. 38.↵
Bibliographie
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—, “A Flâneur in the Outback: Walking and Writing Frontier in Central Australia,” New Scholar: An International Journal of the Humanities, Creative Arts and Social Sciences 3/3, 2014, p. 51–72.
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—, “The Power and Purpose of Literature: Boisbouvier Oration 2018,” Meanjin, summer 2018. https://meanjin.com.au/essays/the-power-and-purpose-of-literature/
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Auteur
Laura Singeot
Laura Singeot is an associate professor in Cultural and Visual studies at Université de Reims Champagne Ardenne, France. She is interested in the representations of Indigeneity in contemporary Indigenous literatures from Australia and Aotearoa-New Zealand, from novels and poetry to dystopic Young adult fiction and Sci-fi. She is also researching new museology and Indigenous visual art, especially digital and new media art, focusing on its integration into global networks of creation, curation and reception. Her methodology rests on a comparative transdisciplinary approach, drawing from concepts theorized in decolonial thought.
Pour citer cet article
Laura Singeot, Songlines: A Counter-Mapping of the Indigenous Australian Self in Alexis Wright’s Novel Carpentaria and the International Itinerant Exhibition Songlines, ©2024 Quaderna, mis en ligne le 15 décembre 2024, url permanente : https://quaderna.org/7/songlines-a-counter-mapping-of-the-indigenous-australian-self-in-alexis-wrights-novel-carpentaria-and-the-international-itinerant-exhibition-songlines/
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