Tracing the stars with songlines

A pulsing and spatial Australian ethnic narrative arrives in the national capital

- SUGANDHA MUKHERJEE

SONGLINE IS A word that, at first hearing, suggests melody, a path carried by sound. It is an apt association, though not in the way one expects.

Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters, on display at Humayun's Tomb Museum in Delhi, presents an Australian First Nations creation saga not as a static sequence of artefacts but as a pulsing, spatial narrative that behaves like music: cyclical, immersive and, above all, alive. The exhibition arrives in Delhi through a partnership between the National Museum of Australia and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art.

The story at its core is shared across Western and Central Australia: seven sisters pursued across deserts by a shape-shifting man, Wati Nyiru. It is a tale that holds moral instruction, ecological knowledge and spiritual law, an entire cosmology embedded in movement. What distinguishes this exhibition is not its subject but the degree of custodianship exercised by the First Nations Elders who have shaped it. Their presence is the framework rather than an annotation.