The Indigenous peoples of Australia have been traveling across the continent constantly, but in a manner very different from how we travel today.
In these long journeys, there were certain qualities that distinguished a good traveler from a mere tourist today: a curiosity about and desire to learn from unfamiliar places and peoples, and a deep respect for new places and their people.
Their method of travel was distinctive: they did not use maps or mark their paths with drawings or signs on the ground. The entire Australian continent was mapped out through different songs, songlines, which spoke of the rivers they crossed, the mountain ranges around them, the salt flats and sand dunes, the water wells, the places where there was food, and even the stars, as these paths could also extend to the sky, using constellations as guides in their journeys.
As novelist Bruce Chatwin says, “wherever they went, their footsteps left a trail of music, and at last, when the whole Earth had been sung into being, they felt exhausted.”
Within their belief system, a songline follows the path taken by the ancestral spirits who created the world in the primordial era, and each natural landmark they encounter along the way — a depression, a lake, a scarred tree—can symbolize a footprint of their ancestors.
Writer Valeria Mata explains that each ancestor scattered words and musical notes with every step they took, and those traces were quietly woven into the land.
Thus, the songlines functioned as maps and as points of orientation: knowing the song meant knowing the territory. However, since the arrival of English settlers on the continent, what were once spiritual trails gradually became commercial routes — wide roads traveled by carts — eventually evolving into many of the highways that crisscross the country today.
This unique way of understanding the path also led them to care for nature: the songs were, at the same time, a way to thank the land for what it had given them. When the land where they lived was no longer fertile, they would leave so nature could recover and move on to a new place.
Marking the land was forbidden, hence they sang to it. In fact, the English settlers called this land Terra Nullius, meaning “empty of culture and civilization,“ when it was, in reality, a place rich in culture, tradition, spirituality, and life.
On the other hand, the journey also emerged from a desire to know the other. The inhabitants of the center of the continent traveled to the sea to learn about the way of life there and vice versa, and when they arrived in a new territory, they sang in the language of the people there to signal that they honored and respected that land, acknowledging that their journey had begun from that very place.
From these exchanges, they traced routes in different languages, allowing them to travel more than 3,500 kilometers; many of these routes are still used today. It is said that you can follow a songline that connects the Central Desert Region with Byron Bay on the east coast of Australia.
As a rite of passage to reach maturity and the sacred knowledge of their community, young people between the ages of ten and sixteen had to undertake a half-year solo journey, guided by the ancestral knowledge embedded in these songlines. This nomadic period taught them to find food, water, and shelter, and to recognize edible and medicinal plants. It taught them to fend for themselves and to value their land.
Thus, travel becomes the cornerstone of Australian Indigenous communities, who moved from place to place, guided by song, caring for the land in a way that could serve as an example to our current society.
These songlines represent the oral literature of the Indigenous Australian people and are comparable to The Odyssey, The Iliad, or even the Genesis stories, which also delve into our origins and were transmitted orally through song. But they also now serve as a reminder of the importance of paying attention to our foundational tales, of protecting our nature, of the innate desire to know that connects us with the unknown, and of once again traveling with respect and care for the natural world and all who share it.
