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304 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1987
"Aboriginal Creation myths tell of the legendary totemic beings who had wandered over the continent in the Dreamtime, singing out the name of everything that crossed their path - birds, animals, plants, rocks, waterholes - and so singing the world into existence."
"The earth gave life to a man; gave him his food, language and intelligence; and the earth took him back when he died...A man's 'own country', even an empty stretch of spinifex, was itself a sacred ikon that must remain unscarred...by roads or mines or railways...
"To wound the earth is to wound yourself, and if others wound the earth, they are wounding you. The land should be left untouched: as it was in the Dreamtime when the Ancestors sang the world into existence.
"The Aboriginals were a people who trod lightly over the earth; and the less they took from the earth, the less they had to give in return...
"Each totemic ancestor, while travelling through the country, was thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the line of his footprints...
"These Dreaming-tracks lay over the land as 'ways' of communication between the most far-flung tribes.
"A song was both map and direction-finder. Provided you knew the song, you could always find your way across [the] country...
"A man on 'Walkabout" always [travelled] down one of the Songlines."
"He named the waterhole, the reedbeds, the gum trees - calling to right and left, calling all things into being and weaving their names into verse...
"The distance between two such sites can be measured as a stretch of song...
"The Ancients sang their way all over the world. They sang the rivers and ranges, salt-pans and sand dunes...wherever their tracks led they left a trail of music...
"They wrapped the whole world in a web of song...
"A man raised in one part of the desert would know its flora and fauna backwards. He knew which plant attracted game. He knew his water. He knew where there were tubers underground. In other words, by naming all the 'things' in his territory, he could always count on survival."
"By singing the world into existence, the Ancestors had been poets in the original sense of 'poesis', meaning 'creation'...
"The man who went 'Walkabout' was making a ritual journey. He trod in the footprints of his Ancestor. He sang the Ancestor's stanzas without changing a word or note - and so recreated the Creation."
"All our words for 'country' are the same as the words for 'line'."
"The song was supposed to lie over the ground in an unbroken chain of couplets: a couplet for each pair of the Ancestor's footfalls, each formed from the names he 'threw out' while walking."
“It's a weird country,” I said.
“It is.”
“Weirder than America.”
“Much!” he agreed. “America's young! Young, innocent and cruel. But this country's old. Old rock! That's the difference! Old, weary and wise. Absorbent too! No matter what you pour on to it, it all gets sucked away.”
Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it…but by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill…Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.