Walking through a Songline

Walking through a Songline is a small multisensory digital pop-up experience that is based on the National Museum of Australia’s (NMA) internationally-acclaimed large touring exhibition Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters.

Cultural custodians approached NMA saying ‘our songlines are being broken up, we want you to help us put them back together’ - that means tracking the seven sisters songlines across three deserts. From this, the Songlines exhibition was curated under the guidance of cultural custodians, traditional owners and artists across multiple communities. The digital work was compiled and mapped by Australian creative technology company, Mosster, based in Melbourne.

Songlines are lyrical mappings that tell the history and meaning of the Ancestors’ creation paths that crisscross Australia. All Ancestral journeys create songlines, which can be viewed as corridors of knowledge. These stories form the foundational history of Australia, as told by artists, custodians and traditional owners.

Songlines reveal how beings relocated from different parts of the country, how sacred and ceremonial places and landmarks came to be - spiritual, ecological, economic, cultural and universal connection pathways that have been described as ‘written on the land’ and then sung.

The immersive experience follows in the tracks of the Seven Sisters Tjukurrpa [chook-orr-pa] or Dreaming, across the Western and Central deserts of Australia, as they are chased by a male pursuer. Their encounters are imprinted in the features of the land and tell of where to find food and water and how to behave correctly. Eventually they are chased across the land and into the night sky where they become the Pleiades star cluster.