Staff, students and visitors were welcomed to our assembly with a video about the Seven Sisters Songlines in line with this years theme: Songlines: The living narrative of our nation.
Local Elder Mr Graham Moore performed a Welcome to Country to open our assembly and welcomed our special guests Bruce Toomey and Kathy Thomas from National Parks and Wildlife Services.
Our students learnt that in the Dreamtime, things were created by ancestral spiritual beings and we now have Dreaming tracks that criss-cross Australia and trace the journeys of these spirits. These are sometimes called Songlines. They record the travels of these spirits who sung the land into life. These Songlines are recorded in traditional songs, stories, dance and art. They carry significant spiritual and cultural connections to knowledge, customs, ceremony and lores of many Aboriginal nations and Torres Strait Islander language groups. Songlines are maps of land, sea and country. They describe travel and trade routes, the location of water holes and food. They allowed people to navigate the vast distances of this nation and its waters.
The Seven Sisters Songline covers more than half the width of the continent, from deep in the Central Desert out to the West Coast, while others connect the Gulf Of Carpentaria with the Snowy Mountains.
Aboriginal language groups are connected through the sharing of these Songlines, with each group being responsible for parts of the Songlines. Songlines have been passed down for thousands of years and are central to the existence of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
A film was then shared so students could learn more about how Songlines connect people to Country and the country to people. Our school band shared a performance with our audience, and the Dreaming story of Tiddalik by Cecilia Egan and illustrated by Elizabeth Alger was shared as a narrated version by students from Merimbula Public School. The assembly closed to the sounds of Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu singing Wiyathual.
