In this monologue Dr. John A. King explains two core concepts of Australian Aboriginal culture—"sorry business" and the distinction between Dreamtime stories and Songlines. He describes sorry business as the Aboriginal mourning practice in which the deceased’s spirit is allowed to linger for up to a year, during which the name is not spoken and the community connects with the family through quiet rituals. He then clarifies that Dreamtime refers to creation myths and spiritual narratives that explain how the land, animals, and customs came to be, traditionally told around campfires to reinforce cultural identity. In contrast, Songlines are practical, song‑based navigation routes that map the continent’s geography, water sources, food, and family boundaries. Using concrete examples—Nikaninyu rock near Tennant Creek, the Three Sisters hills, and a route that ends on the Tiwi Islands—he shows how each Songline marks a family’s custodial territory and functions like a GPS, allowing safe cross‑country travel every three days for water and food. King critiques 1970s white anthropologists for conflating Dreamtime and Songlines into a mystical, inaccurate narrative, and he highlights the sophistication of Indigenous knowledge, noting how European explorers like Burke and Wills failed to understand these systems. The talk emphasizes the cultural, spiritual, and practical significance of these concepts and argues for recognizing Aboriginal peoples’ advanced environmental intelligence.
Chapters
So, uh, ceremony got put off a couple of days. We had some sorry business, which is an Aboriginal term for a funeral. Aboriginal culture, you don't call it a funeral, you don't go and grieve, you simply go, you have sorry business, you connect with the family, you shake hands, and a lot of the time you don't mention the person's name for a period of up to 12 months. They just believe the spirit hangs around for that period of time. And the more you talk about them, the more their spirit is not able to move on. I wanted to just talk about one brief thing, give some people some, maybe some insight. You'll hear 2 concepts talked about concerning Imbrani or Australian Aboriginals. You'll hear Dreamtime and Songlines. And back in the '70s, when a whole bunch of white folk anthropologists were doing this stuff, they all sort of mangled it together. And it became this witchery, mystical, dragon, serpenty thing that didn't make any real sense. And, you know, there was a little bit of pat on the head, condescendingly, there, there, little black people. They're two very distinct concepts. So let's talk about Dreamtime. Dreamtimes are the stories of creation. Dreamtimes are the stories about how we got here. How the how the how the country was made, how the world was made, why the frog you know croaks before a storm but not afterwards. All those sorts of things. So there's a lot how the willy wagtail got its willy wagtail name and all that. So it's all those sorts of things. They're your dreamtime stories. They're the stories your mothers would tell the children. The fathers would tell the children. The grandfathers would around the fire because that would be. in reinforcing culture and giving them an explanation of how they connect to the land and their ancestors. Now the second thing is songlines, and songlines are very strategic, and you'll hear them using very similar terms to some Dreamtime stories. For example, the flying flocks came from Alice Springs and it stopped at a place called Nikaninyu, and Nikaninyu is a lizard, and it stopped at the place of the lizard. We'll just call it that, make it simple for you. Stopped at the place of the lizard, but then the flying fox picked up the lizard and went forward, and it shape-shifted in and then came down and seduced 3 women and then moved on and went up to another place. Okay, so what, what that's actually doing is the lines that come from Alice Springs come up and they stop at a certain rock in the middle of Tennant Creek called Nikaninyu, and a certain rock, and then from that rock it continues north Up to the place called the Three Sisters, which is three large hills—not large hills, but three hills. They're three. So Aboriginal law: anything looks like a set of breasts is women's business. Anything looks phallic is is men's business. It's not that complicated. So then goes to this place. So but what that what that means is there's a song line from the place of the lizard to the place of the breast. So the three sisters. So that song line actually denotes a family's Boundary. They own that songline. That songline belongs to their family. It's like GPS coordinates. Now on the western side, there's a place where the dog and the bustard bird, the bush turkey, walk together. And then they get— they walk from this place, this soakage, up to another place. And when they get to that place, the dog turns west and the bustard bird flies on and ends up in the Tiwi Islands. So that particular songline— That denotes the boundaries of another family's property. So this is how you— this is how they could cross Australia on these songlines, because every 3 days there was water and food, because the songlines would lead you to a soakage, which is a water place, or a place where there was food that had been cultivated, or they knew there was kangaroo, they knew there were emu, wallabies about, etc. So you could cross all of Australia following the different songlines because you're actually going to custodians' places, and the custodians were looking after country where they knew what the fauna and flora were like, and they knew that we could get bush tucker of different forms. So it's a very intricate— it's been developed over 70,000 years, and it's absolutely bloody fascinating. And to call these people primitive, where they had a system that still to this day is as accurate as GPS, and they crossed the country, they could navigate the country the size of North America. The continent of North America, the continent of this, what the Europeans call Australia. They could navigate this country, go from place to place, no starvation, no dying of thirst. That's why when Burke and Wills and those guys came through, these blackfellas just stood around looking at them going, why are they not going over there, you know, another couple of hundred feet where there's water? Why are they sitting at this tree just dying? That's kind of stupid, isn't it? Because they knew where everything was. So it's absolutely fascinating. So that's the differences between the creation stories or the Dreamtime, where spiritual aspects of things, the mythology that's tied to it, and the songlines, which are very practical, how to survive walking the length and the breadth of this continent.
