Narrator: Movement and communication over vast distances; deep
understanding of landscape; methods of preparing food, can all be summed up in
the western desert word, chukulpa, the Law. Crucial to the law, was respect for
the knowledge built up over thousands of years. It informed the relationships
and power within society, and it was the social glue that enabled our ancestors
to survive the ice age, even in the harshest of places.
Narrator: (Ernie Dingo): Like their ancestors, they are
following the warra-nyi-nyi songline to cross the treeless plain of the nullabor.
It’s forbidding country – there’s no plant food and only two tiny water holes
over thousands of square kilometres.
Scott Cane: …Dreaming is a much more complex, fundamentally important apparatus within
society than just the turkey went here and the bush man made the mountain…it’s
much more about the fundamentals of their society, in which once you know and
are initiated and participating in those rituals, you also come to know the
country and where you can go and where you can’t go and what’s safe, what’ll
allow you to survive, and what will be dangerous for you…once you know that -
this is for me the central importance of the law: you then become an important
person in society.
So, because of their knowledge of that law, the religion of
the land actually configures the social politics of the community. And it’s the
system by which people gain status; society is ordered.
Narrator: People were using the knowledge of the law to
cross the Nullarbor plain 20,000 years ago. They made the epic journey to
Kanulda cave, about once a generation. They never forgot the songline that
guided them here.
