(Prose) The Pleiades, The Seven Sisters and Songlines by Susan Hawthorne

In February I travelled to Canberra to see the Songlines exhibition which was on at the Australian Museum. I have been thinking about this star cluster for many years, but this exhibition is the first to be curated by Aboriginal women and to be mounted in such an extraordinary way with paintings, soundscapes, immersive multimedia and explanations of the surface meanings of the art.

In 2002 I heard Munya Andrews, an Indigenous woman from the Kimberley region of Western Australia, give a talk about the Pleiades at the Midsumma Festival in Melbourne. We talked and I asked to see the manuscript she was writing. Over the next years or two, Munya worked on her manuscript and the book was published in 2004, The Seven Sisters of the Pleiades: Stories from around the World. The book begins with the stories told to her by her grandmother. Munya goes on to trace the extraordinary connections between different mythic traditions, she comments on the overlaps between the Greek tradition with its birds and the traditions found in Australia where birds are also part of the story. She looks at the importance of the Pleiades in determining seasonal and agricultural systems and festivals connected to those systems. She follows the Pleiades across the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean that the Polynesians use in their navigating. There is a great emphasis on Indigenous traditions from around the world in this book including Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, the Ainu of Japan, Native Americans from North and South America as well as the traditions of India, Egypt and Greece. It is a treasure trove of information.

I remembered what I had written in my novel, The Falling Woman (1992).

You sing of the old times, singing four words, repeating them over and over. Others join in, and soon everyone is singing.

The chant becomes a mantra. We sing and we forget. We sing and we remember. We sing and we invent, creating new meanings for old stories, old chants. We reinterpret the story, the chant. The words give us one meaning. The words are:

The emus became stars.

We know the story behind the simple song, a story of flight and transformation. On the dusty plains of Australia and in the island world of Greece, they tell the same story.

Seven maidens in the form of birds were pursued by suitors. The maidens, as emus or doves, fled across the earth and became stars, forming the constellation of the Seven Sisters. Their pursuers became the group of stars we know as Orion.

You can see the eternal flight if you look into the summer night sky. As winter approaches the Seven Sisters disappear over the western horizon.

Psappha wrote:

The moon

and the Pleiades both

have set

The night is half gone

Time passes me by

still I sleep alone

The Seven Sisters:

Alcyone Merope Maia Taygete

Electra Calaeno Asterope

Daughters of Pleione

The Songlines Exhibition follows the stories of women from Roebourne in Western Australia in Martu lands through Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) lands and Ngaanyatjarra lands in South Australia. This is a distance of several thousand kilometres. The basic story is the pursuit the seven stars who are sisters by. They are pursued by a man who is represented by Orion. In some of the stories, the women escape, in others they turn on the old man who is chasing them, in some one of the sisters is raped and sometimes reappears, sometimes she doesn’t.

Wati Nyiru turned himself into flowers. The eldest sister says, ‘Don’t pick these flowers. The flowers are him!’
–Inawinytji Williamson, 2016

Wati is the word for man ins several desert languages.

There are beautiful sculptures of the sisters who fly up to become starts. There is so much in the exhibition and it is impossible to describe it in a very short post.

To get some idea of the power of this exhibition, you can purchase a copy of the exhibition catalogue, Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters, Margo Neale (ed.). It includes the background to the exhibition, stories artists, mostly women, essays and beautiful reproductions from the exhibition.

Links:

Seven Sisters of the Pleiades: http://www.spinifexpress.com.au/Bookstore/book/id=138/

The Falling Woman: http://www.spinifexpress.com.au/Bookstore/book/id=64/

Songlines exhibition: http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/songlines

Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters catalogue: http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/songlines/shop

The translation of Sappho above is by Susan Hawthorne © 1992.

(Meet Mago Contributor) Susan Hawthrone.