According to aboriginal Australians, linguistic barriers are overcome when two travellers meet as they can ‘sing’ to each other. The sounds of the song represent geographical features like rivers and valleys, human made features like settlements, myths, as well as representing the person and the persons’ tribe. This is a simplistic understanding of the songlines but in effect the aboriginals have assigned symbolic meaning to their lives in the form of song. Regardless of language as long as the tribes share similar cultures, which adjacent tribes often do, then mutual comprehensibility is assured with some (song based) negotiation.
Bartlett’s 1932 study (as cited in Schunk, 2012) about how stories are adapted to fit local cultural archetypes or ‘schemas’ can be seen as a way songlines function as comprehension tools. Additionally the songlines can be seen as a type of multifunctional schema (Schunk, 2012) as they organize many propositional networks: factual, environmental, mythical, verbal, audible and symbolic.
For a young person to become an adult they must understand the symbols and meanings behind them or as they travel they won’t be able to ‘read’ the landscape.
Not recalling the sequence of the songlines or incorrectly interpreting them will lead to a person literally and figuratively getting lost. After all, it isn’t until a person is older will they see the real geographical features the songlines describe.
Information processing theory talks of propositional networks that become declarative knowledge when stored in long term memory (LTM) (Schunk, 2012). As a person learns the songlines they input new information into the propositional network, the new content knowledge is assigned meaning by the individual because the new part of the song is linked with previously learned songlines. As Anderson claims (Anderson, as cited in Schunk, 2012), commonality of input supports transfer which helps information processing.
The songlines are the memory store of the peoples, a map made of symbols, all of which one must learn from your own community in order to conceptualize the world as it ‘really’ is. Another theory that fits with this metaphor is Bruner’s modes of Knowledge Representation, specifically ‘Iconic and ‘Symbolic’ (Bruner, as cited in Schunk, 2012). The iconic are represented by the real images conjured by the songs, and the symbolic are the stories, myths associated with the real place. The songlines conflate these two modes more than we in the West do, but as Bruner posits the symbolic still remains the preferred form.
For me the songlines are an ancient, yet living example of how people socially construct an objective reality (Kanuka, Anderson, 1999). If reality was subjective such a form of communication couldn’t exist as it would be mutually incomprehensible over the vast distances of Australia. The songlines are also an excellent, if extreme, example of legitimate peripheral and full participant (Driscoll, 2005). If you are a member of an aboriginal tribe and are still learning all the songs and how they correlate, you are only a legitimate peripheral participant, only when you travel your territory alone and sing the songs into reality will you become a full participant.
In many ways the songlines work as a curriculum. If students get lost among the fact recall of traditional western curricula then the clear advantage of the songlines is that they are designed holistically with the big picture in mind (Bransford, et al., 1999). The songlines act as a compass to help learners navigate through the multifarious inputs and act as a schema upon which new knowledge can be tested and where meaning and value can be attributed and allow transfer between concepts.
