Dreamtime is a nineteenth-century translation and a poor one, and the criticism of it is made by Aboriginal people rather than on their behalf.
The word entered English through Francis Gillen and Baldwin Spencer's work with Arrernte people in central Australia in the 1890s, rendering altyerre and cognate terms in other languages. Two things went wrong at once. The English word imports sleep and unreality, which the original does not; and the suffix -time implies a finished era, a mythic past that is over. What the term actually names is understood as a condition that is present and continuing, the ancestral order that made the country, that is still in the country, and that governs conduct now. Many communities prefer the Dreaming, and many prefer their own word and use it in English.
A songline is a route across the continent following the journey of an ancestral being, carried in a sequence of song whose verses run in the order of the places along the way. To sing it in order is to describe the country in order. This makes it simultaneously several things that European categories keep apart: a map, a title deed, a body of law, and a liturgy. The right to sing a stretch of it is the right to speak for that stretch of country, and the two cannot be separated.
The structure has a property worth stating plainly, because it explains why the knowledge is organised as it is. Tracks cross many language groups, and neighbouring peoples hold successive sections. No single person and no single group holds a whole one. The knowledge is distributed by design, which means it cannot be acquired in one place, cannot be owned outright, and cannot be transmitted by any authority acting alone.
Most of the specifics are restricted: commonly by gender, by initiation, and by relationship to particular country. That is why this entry describes the form and publishes no content: no verses, no site associations, no ancestral narratives.
English-speaking readers largely encountered the idea through Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines (1987), which is a travel book built around the author's own preoccupations and was never a source. It remains the most common route by which people acquire a confident and unreliable picture.
There is a model for doing this properly, and it is one custodians built themselves. Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters, developed with Anangu, Ngaanyatjarra and Yankunytjatjara communities and shown at the National Museum of Australia in 2017, presented songline material publicly with the custodians deciding what was included, what was withheld, and how it was framed. That is the standard: not what outsiders can find out, but what the holders have chosen to release.