Saturday Rave: yigga yigga by Elwyn Henaway.

 I wanted to write about songlines. They're precious and remarkable things, the oldest stories in the world, created and tended by the Aboriginal people of Australia.

They describe the landscape by way of a journey through it, being at root an account of the creative spirits or totems which made every feature and creature that is to be seen. These songlines go back thousands and thousands of years. We know this because they include a description of the formation of a volcano which happened tens of thousands of years ago.

If you know a songline then you can go on a journey and never need a map because the countryside will show you its history as you walk.

Songlines are an oral tradition, and I couldn't find an example of even part of one of them written down. Perhaps this is to preserve them in their native state, perhaps this is out of respect for their dignity and power. As a storage system that sounds horribly fragile to me, but that's ridiculous because they have survived longer than any book, let alone any computer storage device.

It still puts them out of our reach, though, so here's a short video of something rather different.

It's good fun, and part of the culture of the same people, at least:

Word To Use Today: songline. The word song was sang in Old English. The word line has a mixed heritage, coming partly from the Old English līn, and partly from the French ligne, from the Latin līnum, both words meaning flax.