Kungkarangkalpa- Aboriginal Australian GroupCollective"Seven Sisters"

The Chase Across the Desert

Seven women traveled across the Western Desert in the Tjukurpa, carrying digging sticks and sacred knowledge. In Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara tradition, they were ceremonial women of the highest order. Among the Martu, they are known as Minyipuru. Wherever they went, law followed.

Kidili the moon man wanted the sisters and pursued them. His desire broke the laws that governed relations between men and women in the Dreamtime, and he would not stop. The sisters fled west to east across hundreds of kilometers of desert country, and the chase shaped the land as it went. Where the sisters plunged their digging sticks into the earth, waterholes opened that still hold water today. Where they made camp and lit fires, rock formations took their shapes. Kidili drove them through the territories of the Martu, the Ngaanyatjarra, the Pitjantjatjara, and the Yankunytjatjara, and each group preserves detailed knowledge of what happened when the pursuit passed through their country.

Escape into the Sky

The pursuit reached its end when the sisters, unable to shake Kidili from their trail, rose from the earth altogether. They became the Pleiades, placing themselves forever beyond his reach. Kidili was transformed into the moon, condemned to follow the star cluster across the night sky in an eternal repetition of the chase he could never win. Every night the pattern repeats. When the Pleiades are visible, the sisters' campfires burn in the heavens as they once burned along the desert track. When the moon approaches, Kidili is still following, still denied.

The heliacal rising of the Pleiades, their first appearance in the pre-dawn sky after a period of absence, marks seasonal transitions important for food gathering, travel, and ceremony across the Western Desert.

Women's Law

The sites the sisters created along their route belong to women's sacred business. Initiated women perform ceremonies at these places and maintain the knowledge the sisters carried. Much of this knowledge is restricted, and the ceremonies are closed to men.

The sisters themselves were never captured, never subdued. They escaped on their own terms and continue their existence in the sky, permanently beyond the reach of Kidili's violation. The digging stick piercing the earth to release water was simultaneously a practical act and a ceremonial creation. At every site along the songline, the sisters' passage is renewed through ongoing ceremony, connecting the communities that share responsibility for different sections of the track.