There’s an obvious topic for this blog which I’ve been reading around without really committing to, and that’s because it’s a serious, huge and complex subject. I’ve touched on it briefly when speculating about the names of creeks – but there’s just so much more to be uncovered, especially to a newbie in this fascinating country. It’s about the Aboriginal peoples of this continent.  

We go on about the settlements around Braidwood as being ‘historic’, being 200-odd years old. But the landscape it sits in isn’t just old – it’s mind-bendingly ancient. Put it this way: humans arrived here 40,000 years ago – and within that timeframe, they adapted, created societies and built up complex mythologies based on the land, animals and natural phenomena they were part of. According to the best online resources, people have actually been living hereabouts for 15,000 years, give or take.

It’s really important to state at the outset that as a western-educated, job-seeking, clothes-wearing stiff – who incidentally carries a whole bunch of half-formed and superficial impressions from a childhood in Africa – can’t fully comprehend the true nature of these mythologies. Even calling them ‘mythologies’ is to cast the wrong-shaped net over them so they slip away.

But think of it this way: these are people like you and me, but with no access to written resources to preserve and transmit their knowledge: how to survive, where to find water, food, and shelter, where to meet up with others; as well as the seasons, beliefs about the cosmos, death and life, and what we are all here for. So just like our own forebears not too long ago, they developed sophisticated oral methods of passing on their lore. All of our western poetry – long before novels and movies and TV miniseries – started out as songs, and this is just what Aboriginal people in Australia did.

But this goes so much further than a system of mnemonics for remembering stuff, or tales of heroic derring-do. Here there’s an immense extra dimension of spirituality that gives these songs an even more profound resonance: they recount the Dreamtime, when mysterious ancestors created everything that was and is – “a beginning that has never ended.”

And by my rather limited understanding, the paths that these ancestors took while creating earth and sky and people are the songlines – so called because they are condensed in songs outlining routes across the land and archiving compendious knowledge accumulated over millennia. Quite a lot has been written about the songlines – like Bruce Chatwin’s imaginatively-titled Songlines, in which the posh pommie travel writer explores the concept, partly in support of theories of his own, but in a very illuminating way.

Part of what Chatwin says is that humans, being a walking species, order knowledge in this way: in a linear fashion, like the track across a desert – but also maybe in 3D, like the mental ‘memory palace’ old-time variety show tricksters employed to wow the crowds with their recall. And as walking is rhythmic, it’s natural that these routes are captured in song, which in turn is easier to remember and teach to others.

So you have songs which are intensely connected to the physicality of the earth, but also recount and relive creation legends – a creation which is still happening.

Earth and spirit meet in the songlines in a way that’s difficult for western minds to comprehend. When an Aboriginal person sees the landscape, it’s with a kind of overlay of culture and mysticism imparting to it a living resonance from aeons of experience. It’s fascinating – the spectre of a world all around us which we recent imports can’t ‘see’ the half of. It’s so much more than the ‘vision of Adam’ literary types talk about, which is merely naive and childlike.

There’s a powerful song by the Indigo Girls – look them up if you like folky harmonies, a tad rocked up, with a social conscience (I’m not selling it am I?) called Jonas and Ezekial, which channels this idea, albeit from an American angle:

I used to search for reservations and native lands
Before I realised everywhere I stand
There have tribal feet running wild as fire
Some past life, sister of my desire

Which leads one to wonder – whose feet ran wild as fire over Braidwood’s landscape in some past life, before Europeans came and parcelled it out, claimed to own it, uprooted the trees and scrub, and introduced damaging invasive species?

According to this web page, Braidwood and surrounds was home to people from two tribes: the Walbanga and the Wandandian. These groups were part of the larger Yuin group, in whose language our neighbourhood was called ‘Wigwigly’ which translates to ‘lots of fur’, thanks to the area’s rich populations of possums, koalas and kangaroos. With due respect to Thomas Braidwood Wilson, I rather like Wigwigly and will be finding opportunities to use it in the coming days.

Sadly, according to the New South Wales Department of Planning, Industry and Environment, “traditional Aboriginal life in the bioregion is considered to have ended by 1850” – less than twenty years after settlers set up shop here. We’ll look more into why in a later post.

So now, when I see a place name or creek sign and think, “ah, obviously based on the original Aboriginal name,” it’s really so much more than that: it’s the linguistic remnant of a system of priceless wisdom, a fragment of a vast cosmic map drawn in songs and carried forward through countless generations of humans. It’s a name that may have been sung by beings not very different to us over and over a million times, committed to memory and set in a complex context combining cosmology and practical information.

We can’t go back to those days – but thinking about how things were for so long enriches us by giving us something to wonder at and to learn from.