The Seven Sisters is one of the major stories of law in our Aboriginal sovereign continent, known in degrees through the law structures and ceremonies that govern its traditional custodians. Different parts of the story are associated with creation sites in various parts of the country-places where this story belongs, where its deep meanings have been passed down through the ages to its custodians to keep the land sacred. But this creation story is much vaster, reaching into infinite space, time, and shapes, and can never be understood in a generalized way. It travels over a vast and wondrous ancient landscape, an ever-changing arid garden of rich flora and fauna over the important sacred sites of the traveling creation story, in rock holes, sand hills, sand plains, creeks, soaks, gullies, caves, anthills, grasslands, spinifex landscapes and in the desert winds of this ancient country that is forever changing and is always alive and powerful. The Seven Sisters sacred songline, the depth of which is known only by the traditional land owners, is a mighty story, linked with the night sky, that has lived forever and can be read in its sacred places over thousands of kilometers. Their story was part of a songline, or “Dreaming track”-one of many pathways that lead across the continent connecting the people to the land and its traditional laws-and it would remain in my memories. He was a shapeshifter who showed up in different places, always in pursuit. I can remember my family members pointing out the Seven Sisters star cluster and telling me how the sisters had fled to the sky to escape a bad man who was endlessly chasing them. When I was a small child, my family would often come together and talk for hours under the brightly lit stars in the yard around my grandmother’s place on the edge of town in North West Queensland. Waanyi writer Alexis Wright draws out the enduring message of the Seven Sisters songline: a timeless and universal story of a flight from danger that runs across the Australian continent, connecting land to sky.

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