“The only thing better than singing is more singing.” —Ella Fitzgerald
What is it about the human voice, especially when we sing, that has so much magical power over us? That penetrating quality goes straight to the soul, it’s why our greatest singers are so beloved, and rightly so—a great singer connects us with the divine. Having spent a good amount of my musical life backing up some very talented singers, I have a fairly good understanding of why this is so, and much of what I learned came when I was still a very young man and I went to Australia, home of the oldest singers on the planet.
I spent a fair bit of time in Australia in the 1990s, largely because my father worked in the mining industry there. I would fly down to visit every couple of years and I would see a new part of Australia with each trip until I had seen all of the territories and explored many of the national parks and their incredible landscapes. I also found plenty of time to visit the galleries, museums, and any musical performances I could find, because that is what Australia’s greatest gifts are—its landscapes, art, and the indigenous people, which are uniquely connected in the most magical of ways.
I’ve tried to learn as much as possible about the world’s indigenous cultures, largely through their music and myth, because that’s where the greatest forms of wisdom can be found. Much of what I learned came from traveling and spending time with indigenous people, literally from the Amazon Rainforest up to the Arctic Circle. There’s really something special, even sacred, about the music created by Earth’s First Peoples, and in Australia, the traditional Aboriginal music is still performed in the same way it has been done for tens of thousands of years—with the human voice and some very basic percussion instruments. When I first heard this music, it allowed me to gaze through a portal to a far more ancient time, and it radically affected my view of music.
My most recent trip to Australia was in 2014 when I was on a musical tour with my band. During that tour, I was fortunate to have a day off in Brisbane where I was able to attend the annual celebration of indigenous identity known as “Clancestry.” The pun on “clan” and “ancestry” is because Aboriginal people are born into clan systems with spiritual totems that have historical and biological ties to the land and its animals. Watching and hearing these indigenous singers and dancers performing on a perfect summer evening was absolutely mesmerizing. As the singers described their songs, they always reaffirmed their deep connection to the landscape, their people, and their culture, all of which are inseparable.
The Aboriginal people have been in Australia for a very long time, with archeological evidence placing them there over 60,000 years ago, and recent genealogical research placing it closer to 100,000 years of continuous existence on the Australian continent. Some of their cave paintings in the Nullarbor Plain of Southern Australia are carbon dated to over 40,000 years old, older than anything in Europe. These paintings are also the first visual evidence of a series of ancient myths and stories that the Aboriginal people refer to as The Dreaming.
The Dreaming is a concept somewhat hard for the Western mind to comprehend, but it’s essentially a series of ancient myths from the pre- historic past, when the Earth and all her creatures came into existence through an autochthonic process. That is to say, everything came out of the Earth itself. The Dreaming is basically an indigenous way to describe the evolutionary process of life, using magical realism and clever, often humorous stories that help to explain the complexities of life on Earth. Each successive generation passes The Dreaming stories on to the next generation, through storytelling, dance, ceremony, and of course, music. This transmission has been going on for literally tens of thousands of years.
The stories are epic in their scope, and they often contain great moral truths that help teach each generation how to live in balance with the Earth and one another. The Dreaming is really the great Aboriginal gift to the world, it is their Holy Scripture, equivalent to, and equally as important as the Hindu Vedas, the Jewish Tora, the Christian Bible, the Islamic Koran, and every other great religious text that man has ever created.
And like these other holy texts, The Dreaming stories are full of beautiful, symbolic metaphors that illustrate the complexity of life and the infinity of the Universe. In some of these stories, great ancestors who have passed from this physical plane have lit great campfires in the sky, which became the flickering stars that remind us they are still watching over us. The seven stars of the Pleiades are seven powerful sisters who grew weary of the demands of their husbands and fled to their own private paradise in the sky. Fire was given to humanity by magical birds that taught humans how to cook and make tools, and crocodiles and rainbow serpents guard the billabongs (watering holes), where they may impart sacred teaching stories—or swallow you whole, sometimes doing both in the same process.
In these myths, the Australian landscape was carved and sculpted by enormous serpents whose undulations caused the excavation of rivers, lakes, and valleys across the continent. Another ancestor, Jambuwal, walks on water with his friend Wuimir the whale, and together they create the thunder and rain, which fill the lakes and rivers with fresh water.
And when it comes to music, you must think about their songs quite differently. That’s because most of their songs are recalled through a musical system of geographical information called the songlines. A songline is an inherited musical map of an ancestral territory, peppered with all the myths and stories that took place within that landscape. These map-songs move across the Australian landscape, singing out the mountains, forests, bodies of water, and any other topography that is important to that particular territory, including all the stories that took places within it. The songline becomes, in effect, the deed and title to that territory, only to be sung by its rightful owners.
Its parallel would be the songs and stories of the Native Americans, which traveled with their migrations across North America, including their forced relocations. Or the indigenous people of the Amazon Basin, who have songs for all the various plants and animals that live within the rainforest. The difference here, however, is that an Aboriginal songline exists on an entirely different time scale of about 100,000 years, something no other continent can lay claim to except for Africa, the original continent from where all human beings came.
Linguists have calculated that there were as many as 500 different Aboriginal languages in use prior to British colonization. Imagine all of those songlines, sung in 500 different languages, over the course of tens of thousands of years. Unfortunately, by the late 20th century, there were only about 100 languages still active in Australia, and those are continuing to disappear as capitalism, globalization, and the English language cause other languages to become extinct. All over the world we see ancient cultures collapsing under the devouring appetite of capitalism, but the Australian Aboriginals have learned that by singing and reaffirming their ancestral songlines, their language, stories, and culture are preserved.
I heard my first songline when my father and I went out to Alice Springs in the Red Center sometime in the early 1990s. We went there to see the gigantic red rock formations known as Uluru and Kata Tjuta, which you’ve seen on every advertisement from the Australian tourist commission. Out near Uluru, we listened to a man from the local Pitinjara tribe sing a songline about the land we were visiting, his ancestor’s land, which had recently been returned to his people. He sang the song in his own language and then later explained that it was about the landscape we were viewing all around us.
These songlines can also, in some cases, serve as a formal legal acknowledgment of a tribe’s connection to their land. In a few famous land rights cases, the songline of a territory in question was sung by its Aboriginal owners in Australian court as proof of their ownership of the land. Fortunately, some of the more progressive courts are starting to recognize that these songlines are far more important than the scribblings of a title clerk on a piece of paper.
And then there is the magnificent artwork. The songlines were also represented as a kind of sand painting that, by the 1970s, had evolved into a painted medium. When you see a songline represented in a painting, you cannot help but be moved—they are some of the most vibrant, colorful, and alive paintings that human beings have ever created, because the subject matter is the living Earth itself. This is also why Aboriginal art is some of the most relevant and commercially successful art in the world today. Just do an Internet search of “Aboriginal Songline Paintings” and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about—it’s incredible. This is also how we can support their culture and honor their traditions, by purchasing their art and music, both online and in galleries around the world.
Any historian or musicologist will tell you that the art and music of a people says everything about that culture, whether it is in ascension or declination—everything is encoded in their artistic media. Perhaps this says something about the decaying materialistic culture of the West, which devalues wisdom and the very land and waters we live upon. This is evidenced in our propensity to consume and discard products that pollute the air, land, and sea, without regard to the long- term consequences, which are now beginning to manifest in terribly dramatic ways. We’ve allowed ourselves to be turned into unconscious consumers and we’ve forgotten our ties to the very Earth that sustains us. When did we forget our own songlines?
There is a great teaching in all this, and it comes from the wisdom of indigenous people around the world who have been willing to teach us for hundreds of years—if only we would ask them. It is something we can all participate in and it has to do with stopping, listening, and really paying attention, to all the songs and stories that the landscape wants to sing to us. You’re not going to find it on any corporate radio station, or in a shopping mall, or on any social media platform.
No, you’re going to have to go digging for it, because that’s where the greatest treasure is always found. And what you will find, is your own ancient soul.