文章基本信息

标题：The Songlines. - book reviews
作者：Daniel Barth
期刊名称：Whole Earth: access to tools, ideas, and practices
印刷版ISSN：1097-5268
出版年度：1988
卷号：Spring 1988
出版社：Point Foundation

The Songlines. - book reviews

Daniel Barth

The Songlines White men, he began, made the common mistake of assuming that, because the Aboriginals were wanderers, they could have no system of land tenure. This was non-sense. Aboriginals, it was true, could not imagine territory as a block of land hemmed in by frontiers: but rather as an interlocking network of 'lines' or 'ways through'.

'The trade route is the Songline,' said Flynn. 'Because songs, not things, are the principal medium of exchange. Trading in "things" is the secondary consequence of trading in song.'

Before the whites came, he went on, no one in Australia was landless, since everyone inherited, as his or her private property, a stretch of the Ancestor's song and the stretch of country over which the song passed. A man's verses were his title deeds to territory. He could lend them to others. He could borrow other verses in return. The one thing he couldn't do was sell or get rid of them.