Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters

Songlines, also referred to as Dreaming tracks, are pathways of knowledge that map the routes and activities of Ancestral beings as they travel across Australia. Songlines are both complex spiritual pathways and vehicles for naming and locating waterholes and food sources critical for survival in the desert.

Seven years in the making, Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters is an Australian Aboriginal saga that portrays the dramatic story of creation, desire, flight and survival through the journey of female ancestral beings pursued by a powerful, shape-shifting male figure.

A world first in scale and complexity, this epic exhibition highlights five sections of the Indigenous Western and Central Desert songlines through more than 300 paintings and objects, song, dance, photography and multimedia, to narrate the story of the Seven Sisters as they cross the continent from west to east to flee their lustful pursuer.

Following huge success at its 2017 debut at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, Songlines travelled to the Western Australian Museum, Perth, in 2020–21 and then internationally to The Box in Plymouth, England (as part of the UK/Australia Season 2021–22, a joint initiative by the British Council and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade), the Humboldt Forum, Berlin, in 2022, and Musée du quai Branly, Paris, in 2023.

National Museum of Australia director Katherine McMahon said: ‘Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters is a powerful and moving example of the Museum’s decades-long collaboration with Indigenous communities.

‘Led by traditional custodians, Songlines explores the wisdom of an ancient history with contemporary relevance.

‘The curation of the exhibition is based on the Tjukurrpa, Aboriginal law, through which the country is mapped visually, ecologically and performatively.

‘I am proud to say there has never been an original Australian exhibition of this scale and significance to travel extensively and premiere at galleries across the world,’ Ms McMahon said.

Maj Meriluoto, Head of Exhbitions at Museokeskus Vapriikki said, ‘We are thrilled to open the Songlines exhibition at Museum Centre Vapriikki. Our museum has a long history of presenting stories of various Indigenous peoples and groups in our exhibitions and highlighting the issues facing Indigenous communities around the world.

‘We work closely with the Sami Museum in Inari, the National Museum of the Sami people in Finland. We are honoured to be able to share the Seven Sisters’ story and look forward to presenting it to our visitors. Collaborating with the National Museum of Australia and the Aboriginal curatorium and communities supporting the exhibition has already opened new avenues for discussion and cooperation’, Ms Meriluoto said.

The exhibition features the world’s highest resolution travelling DomeLab, which immerses visitors in images of Seven Sisters rock art from the remote Cave Hill site in South Australia, animated art works, and the transit of the Orion constellation and the Pleiades star cluster. Standing beneath the 7-metre-wide domed ceiling, visitors are transported to Seven Sisters sites on the songlines.

By following the exhibition’s trail of magnificent art and installations that function as portals to place, visitors effectively ‘walk’ the songlines. These are both complex spiritual pathways and vehicles for naming and locating waterholes and food sources critical for survival in the desert.

Margo Ngawa Neale, Emeritus Curatorial Fellow, First Nations, at the National Museum of Australia and lead curator of the exhibition, said she and community representatives were looking forward to sharing Australian Aboriginal culture with the Sami people and broader Finnish audiences.

‘Songlines are a knowledge system. They can be visualised as corridors or pathways of knowledge that crisscross the continent, laid down by creator beings over millennia. It is along these routes mapped by ancestral beings that Indigenous people travelled to learn from Country as one would access knowledge from libraries,’ Ms Neale said.

‘The Seven Sisters songlines are among the most significant of the extensive creation tracks that crisscross Australia. The story of the Seven Sisters is one of pursuit and escape, desire and magic, and the power of family bonds.

‘Together with the community curatorium we are gratified that this exhibition, which drew record crowds in Australia, is now being seen internationally.

‘One of the prime motivations of the exhibition was not only to preserve and strengthen the songlines but also to share with the world the contemporary relevance of the ancient wisdoms they contain or convey.

‘This is not an art exhibition, a history exhibition or a science exhibition. It is all of these. It is both an Australian Aboriginal exhibition and a universal story of humankind. It offers us connectivity to each other and our planet in a fragmenting world,’ Ms Neale said.

Background

The project that led to the Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters exhibition resulted from an urgent plea by Anangu traditional custodians of Australia’s central western desert, ‘to help put the songlines back together as they were getting all broken up’. This initiative by the Aṉangu people was to not only preserve the Seven Sisters knowledge for future generations but also to engage all peoples in this invaluable piece of world heritage.

Songlines traverses three Indigenous lands: those of the APY (Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara) people through the central deserts, the Ngaanyatjarra people to the west of Australia and the Martu people in the north-west of Australia.

Since 2010, National Museum of Australia curators, led by an Indigenous Community Curatorium of mostly elders, have gone back to Country to track the Seven Sisters songlines. Younger people are also now joining the curatorium as part of the intended cross-generational transfer of knowledge.

Along the journey, Indigenous cultural custodians recorded their knowledge of the Seven Sisters in art works, stories and film which have become part of the National Museum of Australia’s National Historical Collection.

All research material collected for this project has been deposited in the Aboriginal-managed digital archive Aṟa Irititja, in Alice Springs, in the Northern Territory.

Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters received the prestigious Best in Show award at the 2018 Australian Museums and Galleries National Awards.

The exhibition will be on display at Vapriikki from 11 October 2024 to 30 March 2025.

Media contact: Diana Streak +61 409 888 976 or media@nma.gov.au