The Songlines: Steve Aufrecht

Owning land is so much a part of our culture that we tend to forget the idea of private property is a human invention. In this excerpt from his book, The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin relates a totally different way that humans conceive their relationship to land.

‘Before the whites came, ... no one in Australia was landless, since everyone inherited, as his or her private property, a stretch of the Ancestor's song and the stretch of country over which the song passed. A man's verses were his title deeds to territory. He could lend them to others. He could borrow other verses in return. The one thing he couldn't do was sell or get rid of them.

... A "stop," he said, was the "handover point" where the song passed out of your ownership; where it was no longer yours to look after and no longer yours to lend. You'd sing to the end of your verses, and there lay the boundary.'