A Chase Written Into Thousands of Kilometres of Country

The Seven Sisters narrative is not a story about a place. It is a story that is a line of places, running for thousands of kilometres across the Western Desert and beyond it. A group of ancestral women travels and a man pursues them, and where they camped there is a rock hole, where they dug there is a soak, where he tried to trap them there is a formation, so that the sequence of features in the ground is the sequence of the narrative. A songline of this kind is at once a religious narrative, a map, a statement of who is responsible for what, and a set of practical instructions about water in country where water decides whether a journey is possible at all.

The line crosses many nations and many languages. Anangu of the central desert call the sisters Kungkarangkalpa; Martu of the Pilbara call them Minyipuru; other Central Australian peoples have their own names and their own sections. No one group holds the whole of it. Each holds the part that crosses its own country, and performing that part is a right and an obligation attached to that country, which is why an account assembled from several nations at once is a scholarly object rather than a traditional one. At the end of the chase the sisters go up into the sky and become the compact star cluster the Greek list calls the Pleiades, with the pursuer following behind as the stars of Orion. The sky is the last section of the line, and unlike every earlier section it is visible from all the country the rest of it crosses.