About Songline Mobility

Songline is dedicated to developing and marketing innovative products in the home health care and rehabilitation market. The Company is focused on innovations in personal ambulation based on a new concept in mobility assistance. No significant advances in this field have been developed in over half a century. A family of devices has been designed and tested and its lead product is the Walkabout®. We believe our products will significantly reduce reliance on caretakers, family members and other personal assistants and enhance the quality of life for many persons who are mobility-challenged.

The Songline family of products has been designed as elegant yet practical solutions to address the fluctuating levels of mobility assistance needs of individuals who find that their ambulatory needs fall in between the minimal support of a cane and the maximum support of a walker or rollator. This has been described as an unaddressed “gap” in the care of mobility-challenged persons. To our knowledge, there are no products currently on the market or in development which address the intermediary or transition stages in mobility assistance.

Walkabout refers to a rite of passage during which male Australian Aborigines would undergo a journey during adolescence and live in the wilderness for a period as long as six months. In this practice they would trace the paths, or “songlines“, that their people’s ceremonial ancestors took, and imitate, in a fashion, their heroic deeds. Merriam-Webster, however, defines the noun as a 1908 coinage that refers primarily to “a short period of wandering bush life engaged in by an Australian aborigine as an occasional interruption of regular work”, with the only mention of “spiritual journey” coming in a usage example from a latter-day travel writer. To white employers, this urge to depart without notice (and reappear just as suddenly) was seen as something inherent in the aboriginal nature, but the reasons may be more mundane: workers who wanted or needed to attend a ceremony or visit relatives did not accept employers’ control over such matters (especially since permission was hard to get).

Songlines, also called “Dreaming tracks” by Indigenous Australians within the animist indigenous belief system, are paths across the land (or, sometimes the sky) which mark the route followed by localized ‘creator-beings’ during the Dreaming. The paths of the songlines are recorded in traditional songs, stories, dance, and painting. A knowledgeable person is able to navigate across the land by repeating the words of the songs, which describe the location of landmarks, waterholes, and other natural phenomena. In some cases, the path of the creator-beings are said to be evident from their marks, or petrosomatoglyphs, on the land, such as large depressions in the land which are said to be their footprints.

By singing the songs in the appropriate sequence, Indigenous people could navigate vast distances, often travelling through the deserts of Australia’s interior. The continent of Australia contains an extensive system of songlines, some of which are of a few kilometers, while others traverse hundreds of kilometers through lands of many different Indigenous peoples — peoples who may speak markedly different languages and champion significantly different cultural traditions. Since a songline can span the lands of several different language groups, different parts of the song are said to be in those different languages. Thus the whole song can only be fully understood by a person speaking all the relevant languages.