The Technology of Songlines.
By: Dr John Rose
Tags: Climate Change, Technology, Gaia, Self, Songlines

A Technology for Survival

The Technology of Songlines.

A Technology That Only Has Health and Our Planet at its Core.

Gaia’s Connectedness. Picture by John Rose.

The Challenge from Desiree Driesenaar.

Desiree challenges me to write about my approach to technology that supports life. Technology that only has health for humans and the planet at its core.

What a wonderful writing challenge! After some thought I realised it was far more than that. In my context, meeting the challenge requires an explanation of my understanding of Gaia and how I try to use my engineering knowledge to support life through climate action.

What is Technology?

Today, the term technology has been overused and its meaning blurred. A modern definition from Wikipedia states technology is the sum of techniques, skills, methods, and processes used in the production of goods or services or in the accomplishment of objectives.

My preferred working and timeless definition of technology is that it’s the knowledge of techniques and processes. Ancient examples of technology include the discovery of how to control fire and the systematic development of farming from around 9,500 BC. But, these technologies, although fascinating, do not satisfy Desiree’s challenge. I cannot farm, although I do grow some vegies and lighting fires is, in my case, limited to a certain obnoxious gas stove.

Given my background, the words “the health for humans and the planet” can only apply to the Theory of Gaia. The core of Gaia is the connectedness of all the ecosystems in our living Earth. I will discuss Gaia and then in Gaia’s context outline my choice of technology.

Gaia

Isaac Asimov’s book Foundation’s Edge (1983) was the first time I came across Gaia as a planetary intelligence controlling living ecosystems. The book’s theme was based on the Theory of Gaia (Entrepreneurial Earth LLC, 2020) that started to be developed by James Lovelock in the 1960s (Lovelock, 1995, 2006, 2009, 2016; Lovelock J., Taschen, Malene., 2016).

The essence of Gaia is connectedness. Gaia’s goal is to regulate the planet’s surface conditions so as always to be as favourable as possible for contemporary life. Now, through our own actions we are responsible for preventing Gaia from effectively regulating the Earth’s environment. We are in danger of triggering a tipping point that will lead to Hothouse Earth (Steffen et al., 2018).

Being a part of Gaia means that we are not the owners of Earth, nor are we the Earth’s custodians. Furthermore, the Earth has not evolved solely for our benefit, and any changes we make to it are at our own risk. This way of thinking makes clear that we have no special rights over Earth.

In the context of Gaia, the technology to meet Desiree’s challenge must be founded on connectedness. In my opinion, the technology must be shown to have been appropriate for the health of both humans and the environment in which they lived. I have chosen the technology of Songlines.

The Technology of Songlines

After my PhD, I came across Lynne Kelly’s book “The Memory Code” (Kelly, 2017) that described how cultural memory was passed down through countless generations of indigenous Australians using a technology based on an intensive memory training and dissemination techniques called Songlines.

Songline knowledge has been restricted and carefully managed by generations of elders to ensure accurate repetition and avoid the phenomenon of “Chinese whispers”. David Attenborough in his 2015 documentary of the Great Barrier Reef tells of songlines describing the formation of the reef some 12,000 years ago. Scientific evidence supports the events narrated in these songlines that were passed down through the ancestors of the tribes still inhabiting the Queensland area.

The songline is the heart and soul of the Australian Aboriginal culture. In performing songlines, the tribe experiences their rich culture that emphasizes an individual’s inclusiveness in the tribe and the tribe’s connectedness to the land that sustains them (Bodkin, 2017; Bradley, 2010; Kelly, 2017, 2019; Legge et al., 2012; Morrison, 2017; Neale, 2017).

Songlines have accurately preserved the knowledge of the Aboriginal culture over many thousands of years. In fact, this culture spanning some 65,000 years is the oldest continuous living culture on Earth (Clarkson et al., 2017)

The Songline is literally a path in the landscape linking sacred locations (see diagram below). Songlines are bound to the progression of seasons. Tribal elders carefully co-ordinate the timing of travels between sites to ensure correct timing of ritual performances. Elders perform the rituals in recitation, song and dance: they literally sing the landscape. The term “ritual” in the context of a songline has no religious connotation, rather it stresses the careful repetition of time honoured performance (Kelly, 2017). Equally, the term “sacred site” should be understood as an honoured and revered location of special cultural significance. The performance order of a Songline’s rituals is dictated by a site’s location, since the tribe must walk between locations.

Distinctive landscape features and presence of animals at each ritual site act as memory cues for rituals. Australian Aboriginals also make use of rock art, bark paintings and carvings to act as memory aids.

Songlines, Singing the Landscape. Diagram by John Rose. Pictures from Creative Commons.

I believe every human has their own personal songline. I revisit and refresh mine when I walk in Reddy Forest near my apartment (see picture). I know the trees and stop beside my favourites, sometimes seeing Kookaburras, sometimes admiring the character of bark. Exploring these walks in my memory with friends and family give me a sense of time and ancestry.

Unashamedly, I have used songlines’ sense of connectedness in my own thinking and to distinguish this from traditional critical thinking I call it Songline Thinking.

Songline Thinking and Zen Gardening

Zen Garden Meditation on Songline Connectedness by John Rose.

Being a research engineer and systems analyst I use and devise thinking tools that yield useful results. Zen Gardens have a history dating back over a thousand years. Originally these gardens were based on representing the stories of the eight immortals in Chinese mythology. In later times, the Japanese Zen Garden was intended to imitate the intimate essence of nature and to serve as an aid to meditation about the true meaning of existence.

My Zen Garden is quite modest and sits in my apartment’s loungeroom away from the rain and a certain crow who delights in digging for worms. The Zen Garden in the picture, represents a tribal group at a sacred songline site. The elder (large rock) is leading a ritual performance of cultural history inspired by memory cues unique to the location. The connection and interaction between tribe and landscape is represented in the circular raked sand. I have learnt to use this Zen Garden abstraction as a way of highlighting and contemplating the complex relationships of a songline.

The Challenge Answered.

I want to emphasize that the technology of Songlines for preserving cultural identity and practical knowledge required for sustaining the environment of the Australian Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders has resulted in the oldest continuous living culture on Earth stretching over a period of 65,000 years (Clarkson et al., 2017).

Songlines, a technology based on orality (verbal medium used in cultures with no exposure to writing) has demonstrated its worth in maintaining a balanced, thriving human ecosystem. I believe the Songlines technology can be applied to informing and co-ordinating the decision making in large scale climate remediation projects undertaken by a literate society. To this end I created AI-Songlines as a general purpose system to enable the timely, large scale analysis and exploration of all relationships over time in a generic process.

Where Songlines is about preservation, AI-Songlines has to adapt to changing circumstances. Firstly, the use of AI deep learning tools applied to very large datasets will help the early identification of new trends, variations and issues arising from continuing climate change. Secondly, AI deep learning analytics will enable fast response to changes to help inform human decision makers adapt strategies to combat such things as extreme climate events.

Finally, I am publishing my work in the hope that fellow technologists will do some tinkering of their own and share results. In this way I really hope we can make a difference to the impacts of climate change.

Bibliography

I have put together this bibliography to enable you to do a deep dive into the literature. I couldn’t hope to include a comprehensive listing, but hopefully this will be enough to start you off.

Bodkin, F. (2017). D’harawal Climate and Natural Resources compiled by Frances Bodkin; Illustrated by Lorraine Robertson. Envirobook.

Bradley, J. (2010). Singing Saltwater Country. Allen & Unwin. (2010)

Clarkson, C., Jacobs, Z., Marwick, B., Fullagar, R., Wallis, L., Smith, M., Roberts, R. G., Hayes, E., Lowe, K., & Carah, X. (2017). Human occupation of northern Australia by 65,000 years ago. Nature, 547(7663), 306.

Entrepreneurial Earth LLC. (2020). Gaia Theory: Model and Metaphor for 21st Century. Entrepreneurial Earth LLC. http://www.gaiatheory.org/overview/

Kelly, L. (2017). The Memory Code. Pegasus Books Ltd.

Kelly, L. (2019). Memory Craft. Allen and Unwin.

Legge, E. L. G., Madan, C. R., Ng, E. T., & Caplan, J. B. (2012). Building a memory palace in minutes: Equivalent memory performance using virtual versus conventional environments with the Method of Loci. Acta Psychologica, 141(3), 380–390. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2012.09.002

Lovelock, J. (1995). The Ages of Gaia. The Commonwealth Funbd Book Program.

Lovelock, J. (2006). The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis & The Fate of Humanity. Perseus Books Group.

Lovelock, J. (2009). The Vanishing Face of Gaia. Basic Books.

Lovelock, J. (2016). Gaia (2nd Edition ed.). Oxford University Press. (1979)

Lovelock, J., Taschen, Malene. (2016). The Earth and I. Taschen GmbH.

Morrison, G. (2017). Songlines and Fault Lines: Epic Walks of the Red Centre. Melbourne University Press.

Neale, M. (2017). Songlines Tracking The Seven Sisters. National Museum of Australia Press.

Steffen, W., Rockström, J., Richardson, K., Lenton, T. M., Folke, C., Liverman, D., Summerhayes, C. P., Barnosky, A. D., Cornell, S. E., Crucifix, M., Donges, J. F., Fetzer, I., Lade, S. J., Scheffer, M., Winkelmann, R., & Schellnhuber, H. J. (2018). Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(33), 8252–8259. 10.1073/pnas.1810141115

Suzuki, D. (2017). Environmentalism is a way of being, not a discipline. straight.com. https://www.straight.com/news/972276/david-suzuki-environmentalism-way-being-not-discipline