Every culture needs a temenos or sacred place from which to draw inspiration. When oral traditions about such places begin to falter in the face of a newly dominant culture, a few brave souls may seek to record them in writing so that they are not fully lost. I look at this process in two places. One is a twelfth-century confrontation between memories of Arthur in Cornwall and devotees of relics of the Virgin. The other is Central Australia, where between 1932 and 1955, T.G.H. Strehlow (1908-78) collected a vast repertory of orally transmitted Indigenous songs in danger of being lost for ever.

In particular, I consider songlines, orally transmitted sacred songs about journeys of a sacred ancestor (a bird, animal, even a honey-bee) that a community must perform to restore the land. There are vast differences between medieval and Indigenous cultures. Songlines can nonetheless help us renew our understanding of many different sacred texts about journeys, including what Christians call the way of the cross, promoting respect rather than violence.

Constant J. Mews is Emeritus Professor in the School of Philosophical, Historical & Indigenous Studies at Monash University (Australia), where he taught history and religious studies 1987-2021. He had previously studied at Auckland, Oxford and Paris. He has published widely on Latin medieval culture and religious thought from late antiquity to the early fifteenth century, including The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard: Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-Century France among many other books.

IMAGE CREDIT - Mimi Ngaire [My Mother], by Richard Patrick Campbell. The image, reproduced with the artist’s permission and exhibited in Rome for the canonization (2010) of Mary MacKillop, the first Australian saint, now belongs to the Broken Bay Diocese, NSW. Campbell was born at Bowraville in 1958 to a Gumbainggirr mother and Dunghutti father, but is part of the stolen generation, removed from their families by government policies at the time.