Abstract
This paper builds on Max Charlesworth’s evolving interest in aboriginal spirituality by reflecting on potential affinities, as well as great differences, between the notion of the indigenous songline (popularised by Bruce Chatwin, but studied in more ethnographic depth by John Bradley in Singing the Saltwater Country) and sacred texts. In particular I suggest possible parallels between the travels of a spirit ancestor along a particular route, and the account of the journey of a specific early Irish saint (Carthage), itself modelled on the motif of the pilgrim within Jewish and Christian Scripture. Charlesworth always insisted that religion could never be studied as an abstraction, outside its specific manifestation in a culture. I argue that a core element of any religious tradition is constituted not by belief, but by song. Sacred texts themselves record oral traditions, transmitted through song or chanted recitation. While songlines and sacred texts delineate the sacred in very different ways, they both can provide maps of reality, relating to sacred geography and the values of a community. They can be described, in Charlesworth’s phrase as ‘religious inventions’, providing a cultural code necessary for survival, perhaps in a similar way to genetic code within a living organism.
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Notes
- 1.
I am indebted to many people in the course of writing this paper, in particular to John Bradley, Deputy Director of the Monash Indigenous Centre, Monash University, and to those who participated in a joint seminar given there on 12 November 2014.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
Charlesworth, ‘Introduction’, in Charlesworth, M. et al. (eds.), 1984, pp. 1–20; and ‘Introduction: Change in Aboriginal Religion’, ibid., pp. 383–87.
- 6.
Charlesworth 1997; with his essay, ‘The invention of Australian Aboriginal religions’, pp. 51–79.
- 7.
As has often been observed since the pioneering studies of Ong (1982), oral traditions themselves manifest a kind of literacy; see for example Collins and Blot (2003). On the vitality of place in reinterpreting our awareness of sacred texts, see John D’Arcy May’s article (May 2006). He takes his departure from a comment by Eugene Stockton, ‘For an Aboriginal, surveying the landscape is like reading the Bible’, quoted in Eugene Stockton’s piece, ‘The Mindful Land’ (Stockton 2003).
- 8.
Charlesworth, ‘Universal and Local Elements in Religion’, in Charlesworth 1997, pp. 93–94.
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
- 12.
Moyle: ‘Njuṇgunj/Miḷgu songline and ceremonials, relating to the travels of Maḷu (kangaroo) and associated ancestors’ (Moyle 1996, p. 165). In the Oxford English Dictionary, this brief reference is recorded as the first known use of the word to mean a type of song.
- 13.
Berndt 1951, pp. xxvi, xxviii, xxix, 7, 9, 10, 17, 18, 39, 40, 85, 113, 115, 135.
- 14.
See also Central Australian Religion, 1978, p. 729, discussed by W. E. H. Stanner, ‘Some Aspects of Aboriginal Religion’, in Charlesworth 1998, p. 5.
- 15.
Nicholas Shakespeare records his presence in Australia in Bruce Chatwin: A Biography (Shakespeare 2001, pp. 426–46, and pp. 511–17) on the publication of The Songlines (Chatwin 1987) as Chatwin’s Testament. Shakespeare comments on Chatwin’s debt to Strehlow (p. 433), his modelling the figure of Arkady Volchok on Toly Sawenko, engaged in mapping sites for the Aboriginal Land Council (pp. 436–49) and of Father Flynn on Pat Dodson, then a Catholic priest of Aboriginal and Irish descent (pp. 440–42).
- 16.
See, for example, the excerpts included in Bradley 2010, pp. 261–82.
- 17.
This is the case with Margaret Somerville and Tony Perkins writing about the Gumbaynggirr culture of coastal Australia (Somerville and Perkins 2010).
- 18.
The influence of Pelagius in the British Isles is emphasised by Michael W. Herren and Shirley Ann Brown in Christ in Celtic Christianity (Herren and Brown 2002); possibly, Pelagius is only one representative of a broader ascetic tradition.
- 19.
Charlesworth tends to downplay the contrast between Boethius and Augustine (Charlesworth 2002, p. 55).
- 20.
For a measured account of an often popularised theme, see Mary Low 1996.
- 21.
De mirabilibus Sanctae Scripturae, falsely printed among the works of Augustine by Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologia Latina 35 (Paris, 1860), cols 2149–2200; see Marina Smith, ‘The Body, Death and Resurrection: Perspectives of an Early Irish Theologian’ (Smith 2008).
- 22.
On St Carthage, see my study, ‘The flight of Carthach (Mochuda) from Rahan to Lismore: lineage and identity in early medieval Ireland’ (Mews 2013). The Latin text was published as the Vita Sancti Carthagi (1997); an English translation of an early modern Irish version of this text was produced by P. Power, Life of St Declan of Ardmore (ed. from Ms in the Bibliothèque royale, Brussels), and Life of St Mochuda of Lismore (ed. from Ms in the Library of the Royal Irish Academy) [LM], Irish Texts Society 16 (London, 1914; repr. Dublin, 1995), pp. 74–147. The Irish account of his expulsion from Rahan and various songs about Mochuda were edited and translated by C. Plummer, Bethada náem nÉrenn: Lives of Irish Saints (Plummer 1922, 1, pp. 300–16, and 2, pp. 291–302).
- 23.
See Chris Watson, ‘St Carthage in Australasia’ (Watson 2013).
- 24.
On the genre of the litany, see a study of an Irish prayerbook (in which Mochuda is named alongside other Irish saints), copied in the Cork region in the early nineteenth century, but given to the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, studied by Constant Mews, Julia Kuhns and Chris Watson, ‘Remembering the Saints of Munster: An Irish Prayer Book copied by Dáibhí de Barra’ (Mews et al. 2014).
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Mews, C.J. (2019). Songlines, Sacred Texts and Cultural Code: Between Australia and Early Medieval Ireland. In: Wong, P., Bloor, S., Hutchings, P., Bilimoria, P. (eds) Considering Religions, Rights and Bioethics: For Max Charlesworth. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 30. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18148-2_14
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