Writing from the Land: What Indigenous Australian Songlines Teach Us About Story—and How Author Coaching Can Help Writers Learn with Respect
In an age when many writers are searching for new ways to tell stories—new shapes, new meanings, and new relationships between narrative and the world—Indigenous Australian literature offers a fascinating and often overlooked source of inspiration. Far from being static folklore or the remnants of a vanishing past, the oral and land-based traditions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities form a living, dynamic archive of storytelling that resists Western literary norms. These traditions, particularly the concept of songlines and Dreamtime (or Dreaming), reveal entirely different ways of thinking about narrative, place, time, and identity. For writers yearning to break with linear plot structures or reimagine the relationship between story and place, these traditions offer keen insight—but they also demand care, humility, and accountability. This is where the guidance of an author coach can be especially valuable: not to appropriate, but to help writers listen, learn, and write with deeper ethical awareness.
Dreamtime is not simply a "mythology" in the Western sense, nor is it confined to a particular era of history. Rather, it refers to the ancestral, spiritual, and metaphysical dimensions of existence that are continually unfolding. Dreamtime narratives explain the origins of the land, its animals, its peoples, and its customs—not as fables, but as truths embedded in the very texture of being. These stories are not confined to the past; they live in the present, constantly being renewed through storytelling, ceremony, and song.
Songlines—sometimes called Dreaming tracks—are perhaps one of the most powerful expressions of this worldview. A songline is both a literal and symbolic path across the land, charted by ancestral beings who shaped the earth during the Dreaming. Each songline is encoded with specific knowledge—about geography, navigation, ecological stewardship, cosmology, and kinship systems. But these lines are not written in ink. They are sung. They are performed. They are walked. In this way, stories are not detached from the land; they are the land. A songline can stretch across hundreds of miles, shared across different language groups, with each community responsible for a specific segment of the narrative. The story only becomes whole when it is passed from one guardian to another—through voice, through memory, through place.
For Western-trained writers accustomed to thinking of narrative as a product—something bound by character arcs, rising tension, and conflict resolution—songlines offer a radically different model. Here, the narrative does not unfold in a linear fashion, nor does it hinge on human protagonists alone. Place itself is a protagonist. Time is not chronological, but relational. The story’s meaning deepens through repetition, embodiment, and spatial awareness. One does not “own” the story in the modern literary sense; one holds a responsibility to it, often as part of a wider kinship structure. This shift in orientation is not simply aesthetic. It is philosophical. It demands that writers rethink what storytelling is for.
Yet despite their cultural and artistic richness, Indigenous Australian narratives remain largely underrepresented in the global literary imagination. When they are discussed, they are often flattened into the language of myth, or worse, exoticized and appropriated without context or permission. For writers who are genuinely curious about learning from these traditions—whether to deepen their craft or to understand how other narrative logics function—the process must begin with humility. This is not a toolbox to be raided. It is a relationship to be cultivated. And cultivating that relationship requires guidance.
This is precisely where an author coach can make a difference. A good coach will not only help the writer develop their own work, but also help them understand the cultural frameworks they’re engaging with. For instance, a writer intrigued by the idea of non-linear narrative inspired by songlines might be encouraged to first ask: Why am I drawn to this? What do I understand—and what do I not understand—about its origins, meanings, and community contexts? Rather than encouraging mimicry, an author coach can help writers find structural resonances with their own cultural backgrounds or lived experiences. That way, they are writing with the influence, rather than taking from it.
Author coaches can also direct writers toward Indigenous authors whose work honors and emerges from these traditions. The writings of Alexis Wright, for example, offer a compelling model. In novels like Carpentaria and The Swan Book, Wright fuses oral storytelling traditions, Aboriginal epistemologies, and experimental forms to produce work that is both grounded and stylistically radical. A coach might also introduce writers to thinkers like Bruce Pascoe, whose book Dark Emu reexamines colonial misrepresentations of Indigenous agriculture and storytelling, or to resources that outline ethical engagement with Indigenous knowledge systems. In doing so, coaching becomes not just a literary practice, but a form of cross-cultural education.
More importantly, coaching creates space for accountability. In a one-on-one mentoring relationship, there is time to reflect on choices, to explore intentions, and to revise not just the words on the page but the framework from which they emerge. If a writer is unsure whether their work crosses the line into appropriation, a coach can help navigate that uncertainty—not by offering easy answers, but by encouraging honest dialogue, further reading, and often, consultation with cultural experts. This is not about gatekeeping. It is about care.
Writers today are navigating a literary world that is more interconnected than ever before—and more ethically complex. Inspiration can come from anywhere, but how we engage with that inspiration matters. Songlines and Dreamtime narratives ask us to listen with our whole bodies, to recognize that story is not separate from place or people, and to remember that every narrative carries a responsibility. Working with an author coach helps writers engage this complexity with greater sensitivity and insight.
The goal is not to imitate the form of the songline, but to learn from its ethos. What if story was something we walked through, not just read? What if narrative was something shared across generations, across lands, across lives—not possessed, but cared for? For writers willing to listen, and for coaches committed to fostering that listening, Indigenous Australian storytelling opens the door to a new kind of literary imagination—one rooted not in mastery, but in mutual respect.
