Margo Neale is a Senior Research Fellow, Senior Curator and Principal Indigenous Advisor to the Director at the National Museum of Australia. She is also an Adjunct Professor in the history program at the Australian National University’s Australian Centre for Indigenous History, and has published several acclaimed books.
As part of our ongoing First Nations of Australia: Stories & Storytelling campaign, we’ve invited Margo to tell us a little bit about her new book, Songlines: The Power and Promise, and to also share some of her favourite books with us. Read on!
Songlines: The Power and Promise
by Margo Neale & Lynne Kelly
Songlines: The Power and Promise is the first of its kind. It is the first of Thames and Hudson’s series of 6 books on First Knowledges, offering unique insights into Indigenous traditional knowledges from land management to design, medicine and astrology. Songlines invites us to learn about a powerful way of storing knowledge: in text, or in memory through song, art and, most importantly, through attachment to Country. It also offers us the promise of a new way of learning and remembering that enabled Australia’s Indigenous cultures to hold and pass on knowledge for 60,000 years, without books. Personal storytelling is woven with extensive research on mnemonics. It is aimed at the educational market and more.
Buy it here
Book Recommendations from Margo Neale
The Journey of the Great Lake series
by Percy Trezise
The Journey of the Great Lake series by Percy Trezise, comprising 7 slender, lavishly illustrated books, offers the best entry into Aboriginal culture that I know of. It’s not only children but for adults too. – four year olds to 44 year olds plus will be drawn into the world of three Aboriginal kids as they journey around the clans of the Great Lake 30,000 years ago, following the songlines of two sister Ancestral Beings.
You accompany the children on this journey, learning the different cultural protocols and practices of different clans on the lands they pass through. You travel book by book through the lands of the emu people, the dingo people, the magpie geese people, the kangaroo people, and onto the lands of the terrifying snake people. It is culturally rich. It is a suspenseful series in which each book enacts an episode of their adventures in each different clan country starting with Home of the Kadimakara People, where the children are swept away during a fierce storm. Readers learn the cultural practices of the First Australians, including kinship, totems, taboos and how attachment to land works and why. They face many adventures involving giant goannas, marsupial lions, fierce crocodiles and the spells of the dangerous kadaicha man during the era of the megafauna.
This book is suspenseful. It time travels the reader to ancient times while revealing the traditional basis of contemporary Aboriginal cultural protocol and practices. It takes children seriously and is both sophisticated and accessible. A must read.
Buy them here
On a Barbarous Coast
by Harold Ludwick and Craig Cormick
On a Barbarous Coast is a novel based on the journey of the Endeavour, its demise at a place now called Cooktown in 1770, and the fate of its survivors in a strange and forbidding land. This is a page turner, written as a collaboration between Harold Ludwick, a descendent of the local Aboriginal people of the area, and Western writer Craig Cormick.
Each writer is positioned as presenting alternate views. Ludwick presents the perceptions of Aboriginal people who observe white fellas from behind the trees. Those ghostly strangers from the sea are seen as rather inept beings of strange habits and bearing. Watching these enigmatic white ghostly beings, the locals can’t decide if they are ancestor spirits to be embraced as kin or hostile spirits to be speared. Conversely, Cormick presents the experience of the white people from the sea and their feeble efforts to survive as they huddle as close to the sea’s edge as possible. Plagued by the fear of the natives that lurk always out of sight, they proceed to disintegrate into opposing bands as the veneer of civilisation crumbles, and greed, murder, death and treachery take hold.
This is an insightful, informative account of first contact history and its imaginative and real encounters, and reminds one of books like Lord of the Flies.
Buy it here
Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters
edited by Margo Neale
Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters is not only a handsome art catalogue, but also offers privileged access to Indigenous knowledges in a visual and accessible form. It also offers access into that little-known world of the songlines everyone hears so much about but are rarely ever the wiser. After reading this you will get a great sense of them.
Published by the National Museum of Australia, this sensuous book of 225 pages accompanies a major exhibition of the same name. Through the voices of senior Aboriginal custodians of the seven sisters story, informative essays and a plethora of stunning photos, you are sure to feel like you too have travelled the journey of the seven sisters with them. Writing from Inawintyji Williamson, Alison Milyika Carrol from the APY land and Nola and Muuki Taylor from Martu country, combined with the poetic writing of collaborators like Kim Mahood and Lynnette Wallworth, makes for a ripper read. This book is an experience.
Buy it here
Australia Day
by Stan Grant
Australia Day by Stan Grant takes a clear eyed view of Australia as a nation with a shared history and a shared future. It is reflective and human and inclusive of all readers.
Non-Indigenous readers need not fear being taken on a guilt trip with a tongue lashing. Instead Stan encourages a reckoning with our history in a productive and constructive way, and to not shy away from the difficult issues by asking the hard questions of ourselves. He sees the focus on the debate around the date of Australia Day as an opportunity to unpack what unites us, rather than what divides us.
It is an erudite, thoughtful and accessible book, born of a love of country and written for anyone who is looking for a new beginning for Australia. I reckon this author and this book are that new beginning.
Buy it here
Emily Kame Kngwarreye: Mini Monographs
by Emily Kame Kngwarreye
Emily Kame Kngwarreye is one of a series of mini monographs that celebrate Australia’s most treasured artists and features the best of their work.
This small book of 84 pages is dominated by powerful visuals, accompanied by two punchy and to-the-point essays. One of them is by the artist and gallerist Christopher Hodges, who represented Emily throughout her career; the other insightful short essay is by Colin Tolbin, the author of multiple books and plays and a contributing editor to the London Review of Books. Series editor Natalie King is a curator, editor and arts leader who selects the gems of Australia’s greats.
Emily, an Anmatyerre painter, had a short but illustrious career based in Country. Her paintings are remarkably sophisticated yet raw, taking her work into the realms of the international greats. It has universal appeal and is a joy to hold and take in.
Buy it here
Songlines
The Power and Promise
Songlines are an archive for powerful knowledges that ensured Australia's many Indigenous cultures flourished for over 60,000 years. Much more than a navigational path in the cartographic sense, these vast and robust stores of information are encoded through song, story, dance, art and ceremony, rather than simply recorded in writing.
Weaving deeply personal storytelling with extensive research on mnemonics, Songlines: The Power and Promise offers...
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