The Seven Sisters (Kungkarangkalpa)

The Seven Sisters narrative is not a story about a place. It is a story that is a line of places, running for thousands of kilometres across the Western Desert and beyond it. A group of ancestral women travels and a man pursues them, and where they camped there is a rock hole, where they dug there is a soak, where he tried to trap them there is a formation, so that the sequence of features in the ground is the sequence of the narrative. A songline of this kind is at once a religious narrative, a map, a statement of who is responsible for what, and a set of practical instructions about water in country where water decides whether a journey is possible at all.

The line crosses many nations and many languages. Anangu of the central desert call the sisters Kungkarangkalpa; Martu of the Pilbara call them Minyipuru; other Central Australian peoples have their own names and their own sections. No one group holds the whole of it. Each holds the part that crosses its own country, and performing that part is a right and an obligation attached to that country, which is why an account assembled from several nations at once is a scholarly object rather than a traditional one. At the end of the chase the sisters go up into the sky and become the compact star cluster the Greek list calls the Pleiades, with the pursuer following behind as the stars of Orion. The sky is the last section of the line, and unlike every earlier section it is visible from all the country the rest of it crosses.

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.