Lines That Bind a Continent

For most of human history, stories traveled without paper. They moved with bodies, voices, and feet. Across Sahul, the combined landmass of greater Australia and New Guinea, meaning was carried not by texts but by people who walked, sang, marked stone, and returned again and again to the same places. The result was not an absence of history, but a different architecture of memory.

Credit: Sabel Blanco from Pexels

In a recent synthesis¹ of archaeology, anthropology, and Indigenous knowledge, Ian Davidson revisits Sahul’s deep past with a simple but demanding question: how did meaning persist across vast distances and deep time in a world without writing, printing, or mechanical communication? The answer, he argues, lies in art that refused to stay local and in stories that insisted on movement.