CultureOceania and Australia
The Dreaming and the songlines
Map, law and history held in song across millennia
See it on the timeline →In depth
Some accounts describe coastlines that lay there before the sea rose after the ice age, and linguists and geologists have shown several of them match actual shorelines from seven to ten thousand years ago. That would be oral transmission across hundreds of generations — the oldest known continuous knowledge tradition in the world.
For children
Aboriginal songlines describe routes across the land in song — each verse answers to a place, a waterhole, a formation. They work as map, history and law at once, and some can be followed for over a thousand kilometres.
Connects to
Part of Terra Saga — the story of Earth on a timeline. terrasaga.org