Before colonisation, you would walk to the border of your land with another family’s land, and go to a campsite that is maintained for travel purposes. You light a fire and put some damp leaves on it to send up smoke. Then you wait and watch the sky. When they send up smoke, it’s an invitation for you to go meet them. You give them a gift, and they teach you the song of the path through their land to where they’re going. Every path has a song, and together they form a songline. Songlines are Indigenous Australia’s maps. Over days or weeks, you’d learn the songline. You learn which hills and river bends to look for so you can follow the paths. You learn the stars that point the way. And it’s all in a song that tells a story. Narrative and rhythm aid memory.

Brilliant uses of music that go beyond art, something often forgotten in modern Western societies.

To compare and contrast with my obsession of choice (if you don’t mind, I apologize if this seems to lead elsewhere; I mean it genuinely as a point of comparison to highlight that I find the songline notion interesting), in Ancient Rome, getting directions even in one’s own city could be confusing, with directions given by vague and ad-hoc notions of subjective descriptions and distances. We often underestimate or outright ignore organizational technology because it’s not tangible, yet cultural practices utilizing/creating organizational technology like that are incredibly beneficial, on multiple levels.

I’m also reminded, though a much less friendly notion, of Genghis Khan training his soldiers to pass down orders through structured songs, since Mongols were illiterate before Genghis commissioned the Mongol alphabet, but still needed to remember orders verbatim.