Dark clouds still hang over Melbourne

Diamonds of rain slip and slide upon the window. A rainbow appears and arcs, its colours at first vivid, slowly fading into nothingness. Swirls of dark clouds, threaten. Cars snail along the freeway leaving trails of spray in their wakes.


Cars along the freeway

From the window, roofs gleam and the ground is spotted with glistening puddles. Mud oozes from the roadworks, turning the car park below my office and its surrounds into a glorious mud bath. Cars emerge into the carpark to slowly pick their way amongst the many potholes. A pale blue sky appears, clouds are now tinged with brilliant white and the city gleams in the distance. Cranes atop the new buildings their arms outstretch, peer skywards. The varied colours of greens parade themselves atop sparkling diamond studded rain drenched trees.

A dog bounds through the mud below, kicking up sprays of mud as he slides through and into puddles! His owner, rugged up in an old brown coat and boots trudges with shoulders slumped – if only he would look up and see the charmed winters subtle light and the Spring’s miracle of surging growth in the golden blossom of wattle trees.

I realise that this wonderful land reaches out to me, taking me, claiming me in the words I write and that I have become a part of this whole vast country with its deserts, mountains, valleys, bush, flood plains, tropical forests and cities. A vast landscape that creates an ever-increasing word diary as the songlines did to the aboriginals of the past.

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Pathways

Pathways stretch throughout Australia. Europeans in Australia know these pathways today as ‘Dreaming tracks’ or ‘Songlines’. Aboriginals know them as the ‘Footprints of the Ancestors’ or the ‘Way of the Law’. The Aboriginals sang out the name of everything that crossed their path, birds, animals, plants, rocks and so in this way not only sang the world into existence but mapped Australia. As they walked through the country, they scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the lines of footprints that they created. These Dreaming tracks lay over the land as ‘ways’ of communication between the most far-flung tribes. When an Aboriginal moved into another tribe’s territory, he would learn the Songlines of that tribe and thus would be able to move further through the land.

Perhaps this is what this blog is doing – creating a songline of words to travel across the internet to different people throughout the world, to bring it dancing to life in other minds