What Custodians Put in the Exhibition, and What They Kept

A survey of the Seven Sisters can be written at all because custodians decided to make one possible. Between 2013 and 2017 senior Anangu, Ngaanyatjarra and Yankunytjatjara women and men worked with the National Museum of Australia on a project that became the exhibition Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters, choosing what could be shown, painting new works for the purpose, recording narration in their own languages and controlling how the material was arranged. The result is a public account of a songline produced by the people who hold it rather than extracted from them, and it is the source this atlas leans on here. A source of that kind carries its own instruction.

The custodians did not present the whole narrative, because much of the Seven Sisters is women's knowledge, restricted by gender and by initiation, and some sections are held by particular people for particular country and were not theirs to release. What was shown was chosen, and the choosing is part of the source rather than a limitation on it. So the atlas records the shape of the line, the names it carries in several languages, its resolution in the Pleiades and Orion, and the fact that it is among the most widely held narratives on the continent, and it does not attempt the parts that were withheld. A reader who wants more should go to the custodians' own material rather than to a reconstruction, because there is no version of this narrative that is not somebody's property.