• With young Walpiri increasingly growing up in towns, a generation of Warlpiri elders who grew up in the desert are developing resources to teach a new generation of Warlpiri, both in the desert and in classrooms.
• A Warlpiri program called Reading the Country has created a digital storybook as a cultural bridge to the future.
• Songlines go to the heart of Warlpiri tradition, providing a knowledge system for all aspects of Warlpiri life, including land management, wildlife conservation and spiritual traditions.

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LAJAMANU, Australia — A group of Warlpiri men and women gathered along one of the most remote tracks in Australia and stared intently at the ground. Here in the Tanami Desert, along the dirt back road between Lajamanu and Tennant Creek, they all agreed that the tracks they could see told a story: A dingo, a black-headed python and a hopping mouse had all passed this way.

They argued over the finer points — when exactly the animals had left these signs, whether the python was pursuing the mouse or whether it was an adult or juvenile dingo. But from these seemingly random marks in the sand, they were able to piece together a picture of what had occurred, in what order or when.

These were the Warlpiri’s kuyu pungu (expert trackers), capable of reading the deserts of Australia in precise detail. Everyone here was born, and has lived, in the desert for most of their lives. They learned the essential skills of a self-sufficient desert life as their ancestors had, by observing their elders out in the desert. They have a profound connection with the land, and from that flows an intimate understanding of their world, one that encompasses everything from ecology to spirituality.

Footprints in the sand along a sandy track outside Lajamanu. Image by Anthony Ham.

And yet, often for a younger generation of Warlpiri, many of whom lived in towns with only irregular excursions into the countryside, such opportunities are rare. Which is why the Warlpiri trackers were gathered on this remote track outside Lajamanu.

They weren’t testing their own knowledge. They were trying to find ways to pass on that knowledge to the next generation.

After years of such work, in 2025, the Walpiri community and a representative body produced, in both Warlpiri and English, a digital storybook. Believed by its participants to be a first for Australia’s desert peoples, it codifies traditional knowledge as defined by the Warlpiri themselves. At once visual and interactive, the storybook includes interviews, maps and detailed educational resources. Together it tells a story that both opens a window onto an entire world view and symbolizes the resilience of ancient culture.

“We have to learn new ways,” said Jerry Jangala, a senior Warlpiri lawman (elder who upholds customary law) and a key instigator and visionary of the workshop. “We have to learn to ask the right questions so that our young people can keep our culture alive.”

Storm clouds gather over the northern Tanami Desert just west of Lajamanu. Image by Anthony Ham.

The Warlpiri world

The Warlpiri are a desert people, and their homeland is the Tanami, Australia’s third-largest desert. If the Warlpiri homeland were a country, it would have the lowest population density of any nation on Earth, based on various censuses, and not a single paved road crosses an area roughly the size of South Dakota or Syria.

The challenge for the Warlpiri elders and trackers was, of course, to find a way to teach incredibly complex concepts and practices (like songlines and species’ behavior) to a new audience, to a younger generation with one foot in the desert, the other in towns. Much of the learning would not happen out here in the country, but in the entirely different realm of the classroom.

Some younger Warlpiri already work as Indigenous rangers, helping to care for their country. Other young people travel regularly into the desert with their family members to learn the old ways. But with as many as one-third of Warlpiri people now living away from Warlpiri Country, the imperative to find new ways of transmitting knowledge has become ever more urgent.

A workshop Mongabay attended in 2024 was one of many held across the desert, part of a project called Yitaki Mani (which in Warlpiri means “Reading the Country”). Run jointly by the Central Land Council and the Warlpiri community, these workshops sought to create a series of teaching materials that, as closely as possible, replicated how elders once passed on traditional knowledge to the next generation.

‘Reading the Country’ Workshop participants at Emu Rockhole (Yankirri-kurlangu), near Lajamanu. Image by Anthony Ham.

Warlpiri lands are infused with meaning, and the Warlpiri cosmology is a profoundly complex system of knowledge and belief, elders told Mongabay. These systems are built around and atop the very pillars of Warlpiri life: country, kinship, ceremony, language and law. None of these exist in isolation.

In Ngurra-kurlu: A Way of Working with Warlpiri, a paper co-written by Wanta Jampijinpa Pawu-Kurlpurlurnu, an emerging Warlpiri elder, and anthropologist Miles Holmes, they compared kinship, ceremony, law, language and country to organs in a body: Each was necessary.

When writing about kinship, or a Warlpiri person’s “skin group” (not referring to skin color), for example, Jampijinpa Pawu-Kurlpurlurnu wrote how “having a skin name immediately gives a person a place in Warlpiri society because they have a known set of relationships.”

Or ceremony: “Ceremony is a bit like reminding us who we are, who we should be, what we can do.” It also, he wrote, “makes you feel part of something. It makes your heart pump more, give yourself life, makes you proud, and that way it makes you realise that you have this kurrwa [responsibility].”

Or law: “If we become lawless, both the country and yapa [Warlpiri or Aboriginal people] will become sick.”

An early version of the teaching and workshop materials used by the program in Lajamanu. Image by Anthony Ham.

Out on that isolated desert track southwest of Lajamanu, the discussions were about much more than merely tracking the footprints and signs of animals. When tracing the runic inscriptions in the sand, each of these elders drew on knowledge encoded in an intimate understanding of the landscape (country), on each person’s knowledge of their skin group’s relationship with a particular species, on ceremonies in which an animal’s behavior is reenacted.

Teaching how to track desert animals relied on connecting young Warlpiri to that world, beginning with the creation stories of the Tjukurpa (Dreaming) stories that ripple down through the Warlpiri centuries.

Desert songlines

After the kuyu pungu had recreated the paths taken by dingo (Canis familiaris), black-headed python (Aspidites melanocephalus) and spinifex hopping mouse (Notomys alexis), the team worked on materials that could be used in the classroom. When they heard one senior tracker describe the materials as “like looking at the inside of my brain,” they knew progress was being made.

Warlpiri ranger Nelson Tex Jakamarra at the Lajamanu Reading the Country workshop. Image by Anthony Ham.

One manner in which the complicated elements of the Warlpiri cosmology connect is through the songline. A songline contains both sacred or private information — which is known only to Warlpiri who have the relevant cultural authority — and publicly available information. The latter, some of which is included in the digital storybooks the Warlpiri have created, might include everything from family histories and legal treatises to information on flora and fauna, systems of navigation and religious ceremonies.

One of the most misunderstood elements of Australian Indigenous culture, the songline first reached a wider, non-Indigenous audience through Bruce Chatwin’s 1987 book, The Songlines. In it, he described songlines as being on “such a colossal scale, intellectually, that they make the Pyramids seem like sand castles.”

At its most simplistic level, a songline follows the path of a particular species across a landscape, starting with its emergence onto the Earth during the Creation time, or Tjukurpa. At each point where that species paused during that journey — perhaps to rest, maybe to fight or otherwise interact with another species, or to carry out some ceremony — that piece of land became part of the songline.

Each songline remains the responsibility of the traditional owners (kirda in Warlpiri) and managers (kurdungurlu) of that land. In explaining these roles, a senior Warlpiri described the owners as “bosses” who took the lead in maintaining the songline and its sites and ceremonies, and the manager as a “policeman” tasked with ensuring the owners fulfill their duties.

Senior Warlpiri elder and law woman, Alice Nampijinpa Henwood, close to Lajamanu. Image by Anthony Ham.

Jampijinpa Pawu-Kurlpurlurnu wrote how Songlines (also called ‘dreaming story tracks’ or ‘dreaming narratives’) traverse Warlpiri country. They may be long traveling epics crossing the whole of Australia and passing from language group to language group, or they may be more localized.

Within Warlpiri country, each Dreaming track is usually associated with a particular patrilineal skin group. At specific handover points (in the dreaming songlines and at sites on country), “responsibility changes from one family group to another.”

As part of his work, Holmes has used songlines when seeking to establish ownership of the land under Australia’s Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 and Native Title Act 1993. Under the former, around half of the country’s Northern Territory has been handed back to its traditional owners.

In addition to being part of the fundamental meaning of a piece of land or a species or a ceremony, a songline, Holmes continued, is a means of transmitting knowledge.

Songlines, he said, “contain the story of the journeys of the ancestral being. In the Dreamtime, the ancestors are said to have dreamt the landscape, and then they woke from the dream and sung it into being. So the song is also the creation story, and what they’re singing into being is not just the land and the places but whatever the song happens to be about,” he explained.

Jerry Jangala running a question-and-answer session out on country for participants in the workshop. Image by Anthony Ham.

These songlines act, in part at least, as an instruction manual for Warlpiri life. Tied inextricably to a piece of land, a songline can contain rules and laws for ethical living, a script for performing sacred ceremonies, even detailed ecological information about animals and their appearance, the shape of their footprints and behavior.

In this sense, an understanding of songlines in all their complexity — as told in part through the digital storybook — will prove critical in teaching the next generation the sheer depth and scale of Warlpiri tradition and knowledge.

Mirroring the songlines as both a spiritual and practical guide, the Warlpiri’s digital storybook will, the kuyu pungu hope, provide a basis for teaching Warlpiri knowledge to a new generation, both out in the country and in the classroom. It does this through detailed species information, a guide to tracking desert animals and maps tracing some of the Warlpiri songlines.

“We’ve been up in choppers looking for the next sacred site when people will just start singing — we’re flying at 200 kilometers [120 miles] an hour for 20 minutes, and the chopper pilot’s starting to worry that we’re running out of fuel, and they’re like, ‘Keep going, keep going.’ And surely enough, a tiny hill appears on the horizon way off in the distance,” Holmes added. “People were following the songline in their minds (they were singing aloud in the back of the chopper) to get there. So, it’s a beautiful, sacred geography, really — with sound and story.”

According to Jerry Jangala, who reiterated the importance of songlines: “You tell the story first. They learn through the song and by telling the story.”

Termite mounds country scarred by Warlpiri cultural burning in the northern Tanami Desert. Image by Anthony Ham.

 

Banner image: Jerry Jangala running a question-and-answer session out on country for participants in the workshop. Image by Anthony Ham.

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