To the old keepers, land is kept alive by the people who belong to it singing it. When those people die and the Law weakens, the world itself seems to shrivel and go quiet. The loss is felt as damage to the country, not only to the people.
A songline is a single sung route that holds a whole body of knowledge at once. It carries ancestors, kin and loyalties alongside places, plants, animals, seasons and ceremonies, so singing the route recalls how all of them fit together. Geography, memory and relationship are stored in one form, not in separate ones.
Authority and continuity come from the songs themselves, which pass from place to place and from island to island across land and sea. Whoever holds and can sing the songs holds the Law that goes with that country.
A language can encode a social order directly. Here there is no word for friend, because everyone is placed as some kind of family, and men and women speak separate dialects. To live there, an outsider has to learn the language before the relationships make sense.
Treating English, or writing, as the only real way to know things hides the depth and power of oral traditions. A continent that once held 275 languages held 275 different ways of understanding the same land. Living in fragile ecosystems may depend on taking those ways seriously.