In this fascinating article (you can read the full article here) by Christine Judith Nicholls Senior Lecturer in Australian Studies, Flinders University we discover what sets this exhibition apart from so many others and why it is so important to the preservation of this Dreaming.
“Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters is a peerless exhibition of Aboriginal art, thrilling in its breadth and depth.
Seven years in the planning, now showing at the National Museum of Australia, it sets a standard that must be emulated elsewhere if the greater Australian population is to move beyond stereotypical truisms about Aboriginal narrative traditions, concepts and artefacts, which view these as simple or inferior to those of other world cultural traditions.
Songlines sets out to portray one of the most defining and predominant meta-narratives chronicled in ancient mainland Australia – the story of a predatory, lascivious, rejected loner – an Ancestral Being initially in the guise of a man – who relentlessly pursues seven sisters (Ancestral Women) over land and sky…”