reawakening the Black Duck Songline, across 300km in Australia's southeast
- Written by: Robert S. Fuller, Adjunct fellow, Western Sydney University
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains names of people who have died.
Songlines criss-cross across Australia. They are one of the foundational spiritual features of the world’s oldest continuing culture.
Australian Aboriginal peoples had oral cultures: while there are no Bibles or Qurans to document their spirituality, the Dreaming stories of Ancestral creators who formed the land and the features were shared through song. By walking and singing the songlines, those creators are celebrated by the passing generations.
Most of our knowledge of songlines comes from Aboriginal peoples in central and northern Australia, a well-known example being the Seven Sisters Songline[1], which crosses much of Australia from the west coast to the east.
But, due to invasion and attempted cultural destruction since 1788, knowledge of songlines in southeast Australia has been limited. Now, new research[2] has begun reawakening a dormant Black Duck Songline covering 300 km along the New South Wales South Coast.
Read more: Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters is a must-visit exhibition for all Australians[3]
Umbarra and Wumbarra
The Black Duck Songline, as current Aboriginal knowledge holders confirm, travels up the South Coast from over the Victorian border to the Hawkesbury River, north of Sydney, passing through many important cultural locations of the Yuin and Dharawal peoples of the region.
The Black Duck Songline follows the NSW coast, including through Wallaga Lake.
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The Black Duck Songline has now been traced through multiple Aboriginal communities. Knowledge holders speak about how their people travelled along songlines for trade, to attend ceremonies and to access resources.
Read more:
How ancient Aboriginal star maps have shaped Australia's highway network[6]
How a songline is reawakened
A songline is not just a map across Country.
It is a celebration of the stories which make up the songline, and these stories are encompassed in the form of song. The melody stays consistent as a songline passes through different language groups and dialects along the route.
A songline is never extinguished, although the Country through which it passes may be dying because it is not being sung. This has given rise to the Aboriginal expression to “sing up Country”: refreshing the songs and the Country to which the songs belong.
The Black Duck Songline was not unknown to the knowledge holders of the South Coast, but the details of the route had begun to be lost. Probably the last public walk of the songline[7] was by Uncle Guboo Ted Thomas (1909-2002), coinciding with the Bicentennial in 1988.
Other knowledge holders who learned from Uncle Guboo have been able to confirm details of the songline, and members of the Yuin and Dharawal communities are keen to recover the full knowledge of the route of the songline.
