The Ancients Songlines: Australia's Book of Genesis
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Dec 12, 2021 Margo Neale, a curator and expert on Indigenous Australian art, dives into the profound significance of songlines as cultural knowledge. She compares the Seven Sisters saga to epic tales like the Iliad, exploring its astronomical ties and survival wisdom. Margo highlights the exhibition's goal to preserve these stories through embodied performance and the importance of collaboration with traditional custodians. She discusses the contemporary relevance of ancient narratives and their crucial ecological lessons, reminding us how these stories guide sustainable practices today.
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Songlines As Living Knowledge Maps
- Songlines are continent-spanning corridors of embodied knowledge linking places, law, astronomy and ecology.
- Margo Neale explains they function as living mnemonics that map land stories onto landscape features.
Embodied Performance Beats Text Alone
- Non-text cultures encode knowledge in embodied performance: song, movement, tone and painting.
- Margo Neale argues multisensory transmission creates stronger memory traces than written text.
Seven Sisters As Enduring Epic
- The Seven Sisters story is an epic chase used to captivate and transmit complex knowledge across generations.
- Margo Neale compares it to an Iliad/Odyssey/Genesis to stress its narrative power and longevity.
