Bold claim: Songlines weave a 2,300-kilometer web that links far-flung parts of Australia through ritual, song, and storytelling, preserving a shared sense of place. Across the continent, Songlines—also called Dreaming tracks—connect First Nations communities, mapping beliefs and responsibilities from one region to another. Our recent research builds on this idea by combining traditional knowledge with archaeological evidence to trace these connections where historical violence disrupted them.
Isabel’s mother, Annie Hansen, passed down stories from the Wangkamadla people to Isabel, who then shared them with her daughter, Avelina. We merge these living narratives with Iain’s archaeological fieldwork in diverse Australian regions to broaden the map of how songs and tracks cross regional boundaries.
Rock art from one area demonstrates that Songlines extend from Murujuga, on the Indian Ocean coast, to the eastern Simpson Desert, a distance of about 2,300 kilometers.
Preserving sacred places
Annie Hansen (often called Mrs. Hansen) and her husband Jack (known locally as Snapshot) were born roughly 125 years ago and grew up on land at the edge of Australia’s Simpson Desert in far western Queensland. They worked at Glenormiston Station in the Channel Country and occasionally visited sacred sites nearby to maintain them and retell their songs and stories.
The station community treated these visits as casual “walkabouts,” but in truth they were essential for sustaining the people’s connection to Country. Isabel grew up on that land.
In 1982, Mrs. Hansen led a ceremonial tour of these sites, accompanied by Iain, Isabel, and her husband Ramón Tarragó. Some sites were ceremonial—such as a cobble nest—while others were art sites. At each stop, Mrs. Hansen recounted stories tied to the locations and, during the journey, sang in the language she learned from her people while adding sand drawings to illustrate the narratives.
Her songs spoke of connections westward through the Songlines—Dreaming tracks associated with the journeys of dingoes from the West and emus from the Southwest—and she described links to Western Australia.
Our analysis of the rock art imagery shows the same motifs appearing across Australia, from the Simpson Desert to the Indian Ocean.
Tracing connections
We built a map of related imagery by linking smaller, interconnected regional networks of relationships and stories. While each region displayed its own range of motifs, the same geometric signs carried coded meanings across areas.
In the Boulia region, for example, First Nations Yulluna elder Tom Sullivan told us about additional local Dreaming tracks: the Yellow Belly fish from Wonomo Waterhole and the Rainbow Serpent from Woodul Rockhole, both located further north. These stories aligned with mythologies along trade routes used to obtain the narcotic plant Pituri, ceremonies of which were owned by Mrs. Hansen and related women.
We also traced archaeological evidence—axes quarried around Cloncurry and Mount Isa—that moved south along these same routes, with further connections evidenced by 19th-century message sticks.
As Mrs. Hansen once said, rock faces and caves bear paintings and carvings that outsiders have never seen. In that Country lie the bones of her people.
Across Australia, paintings and carvings have weathered over time, yet repeated use of the rock and varying weathering patterns reveal sites that were part of long-standing ceremonial and ritual practices. The recurring signs suggest that the stories Mrs. Hansen shared carried coded meanings that linked communities.
By comparing images from the Simpson Desert edge with those near Murujuga and intermediate sites, we can see that similar signs encoded meanings used in ceremonies, reinforcing a shared symbolic language across diverse landscapes.
From the Simpson Desert to the Indian Ocean, and north toward Cloncurry and south to Mutawinji, these signs likely transmitted common meanings that sustained ritual relationships. When Mrs. Hansen and Jack Hansen went “walkabout,” it wasn’t a casual outing; it was a vital act of maintaining their profound ties to Country, especially after pastoralism had disrupted much of the traditional context.
Together, these threads reveal the reach and continuity of the Songlines that Mrs. Hansen spoke about, demonstrating how living knowledge, art, and archaeology illuminate a vast network of connected places and meanings across Australia.
