The Songlines Quotes
"To wound the earth is to wound yourself, and if others wound the earth, they are wounding you."
"All our words for 'country' are the same as the words for 'line'."
"By singing the world into existence, the Ancestors had been poets in the original sense of poesis, meaning 'creation'."
"Every tribe – like it or not – had to cultivate relations with its neighbor."
"What could be done for Aboriginals was to preserve their most essential liberty: the liberty to remain poor, or, as he phrased it more tactfully, the space in which to be poor if they wished to be poor."
"The Aboriginals had an earthbound philosophy. The earth gave life to a man; gave him his food, language and intelligence; and the earth took him back when he died."
"The definition of a man's 'own country' was 'the place in which I do not have to ask'."
"Aboriginals could not believe the country existed until they could see and sing it– just as, in the Dreamtime, the country had not existed until the Ancestors sang it."
"Our people's trade was always symmetrical."
"Aboriginals believed that all the 'living things' had been made in secret beneath the earth's crust, as well as all the white man's gear – his aeroplanes, his guns, his Toyota Land Cruisers – and every invention that will ever be invented; slumbering below the surface, waiting their turn to be called."
"A song was both map and direction-finder. Providing you knew the song, you could always find your way across country."
"The Aboriginals, he went on, were a people who trod lightly over the earth; and the less they took from the earth, the less they had to give in return."
"Aboriginal Creation myths tell of the legendary totemic beings who had wandered over the continent in the Dreamtime, singing out the name of everything that crossed their path – birds, animals, plants, rocks, waterholes – and so singing the world into existence."
"The whole of Australia could be read as a musical score. There was hardly a rock or creek in the country that could not or had not been sung."
"In my childhood I never heard the word ‘Australia’ without calling to mind the fumes of the eucalyptus inhaler and an incessant red country populated by sheep."
"It was during his time as a school-teacher that Arkady learned of the labyrinth of invisible pathways which meander all over Australia and are known to Europeans as ‘Dreaming-tracks’ or ‘Songlines’; to the Aboriginals as the ‘Footprints of the Ancestors’ or the ‘Way of the Law’."
"His father loved to tell, and we to hear, the story of the Australian sheep-millionaire who strolled into a Rolls-Royce showroom in London; scorned all the smaller models; chose an enormous limousine with a plate-glass panel between the chauffeur and passengers, and added, cockily, as he counted out the cash, ‘That’ll stop the sheep from breathing down my neck.’"
"I also knew, from my great-aunt Ruth, that Australia was the country of the Upside-downers. A hole, bored straight through the earth from England, would burst out under their feet."
"Goods were tokens of intent: to trade again, meet again, fix frontiers, intermarry, sing, dance, share resources and share ideas."
"A man’s verses were his title deeds to territory. He could lend them to others. He could borrow other verses in return."
"To sing a verse out of order was a crime. Usually meant the death penalty."
"Wherever there was a Big Place, the chances were that the other Dreamings would converge on it."
"Every song cycle went leap-frogging through language barriers, regardless of tribe or frontier."
"The tune always stays the same, from the opening bars to the finale."
"In theory, a young man on Walkabout could sing his way across Australia providing he could hum the right tune."
"The song was supposed to lie over the ground in an unbroken chain of couplets."
"The baby’s first kick corresponds to the moment of 'spirit-conception'."
"Territory is not necessarily the place you feed in. It’s the place in which you stay, where you know every nook and cranny, where you are invincible to the pursuer."
"Aggressivity is not necessarily to do harm to your neighbour. It may just be a 'pushing-away' behaviour."
"Music is a memory bank for finding one’s way about the world."
"The road had gone. Our vehicles crawled and slewed in the loose red dirt."
"We turned aside into the sketchy shade of some trees."
"A yellow bulldozer went by in a cloud of dust."
"Using my leather rucksack as a pillow, I leaned back against a tree-trunk and leafed through Ovid’s Metamorphoses."
"‘You never hear them cry,’ Marian said, ‘as long as the mother keeps moving.’"
"He blamed himself for letting them see the earth-movers."
"‘They’d sell off anything,’ he shrugged."
"‘And if babies can’t bear to lie still,’ I said, ‘how shall we settle down later?’"
"‘You must be joking, mate. You think I’d give away my title. You might use it! That title’s worth money.’"
"‘They’re incapable of progress,’ he said."
"‘I’m about to shut,’ he said. ‘Need anything? We got a great line in coconut shampoo.’"
"‘That one needs some explaining,’ I said."
"‘You wouldn’t believe some of the stories I hear.’"
"‘A title’, he said, with great feeling, ‘can make or break a book.’"
"You couldn’t allow Venus into the Pantheon and bolt the door on Mars."
"Men are products of their situation, and learning conditions everything they will ever say or think or do."
"The Greeks believed there were limits to the range of human behavior: not, as Camus pointed out, that these limits would never be surpassed, simply that they existed."
"Without religion, in Dostoevsky’s famous formulation, everything is permissible."
"A torturer can cut off a man’s nose; but if the man gets a chance to breed, his child will be born with a nose."
"Every mythology has its version of the ‘Hero and his Road of Trials’."
"Catharsis’: Greek for ‘purging’ or ‘cleansing’."
"The sensation of being mauled by a big cat may, as we know from Dr. Livingstone’s experience with a lion, be slightly less horrific than one imagined."
"The power of thought allowed man to manufacture weapons–lances instead of horns, swords instead of claws, shields in place of thick skins – and to organise communities for producing them."
"The most sublime labour of poetry is to give sense and passion to insensate things."
"Men vent great passions by breaking into song, as we observe in the most grief-stricken and the most joyful."
"The Ancient Egyptians believed the seat of the soul was in the tongue."
"All passionate language does of itself become musical – with a finer music than the mere accent; the speech of a man even in zealous anger becomes a chant, a song."
"Words well voluntarily from the breast without need or intent, and there has probably not been in any desert waste a migratory horde that did not possess its own songs."
"Poetry proper is never merely a higher mode of everyday language. It is rather the reverse: everyday language is a forgotten and therefore used-up poem, from which there hardly resounds a call any longer."
"Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the 'walks' of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence."
"What can we do? We were born with the Great Unrest. Our father taught us that life is one long journey on which only the unfit are left behind."
"The song still remains which names the land over which it sings."
"I have a vision of the Songlines stretching across the continents and ages; that wherever men have trodden they have left a trail of song."