For example, are Australian aboriginal’s taught to create their own memory palaces, or do they only use the Dreamlines?
@LynneKelly do you know?
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It is an interesting question, but I am not sure it can be answered. I will ask my Indigenous colleagues. Every part of Country is technically part of the songlines - they can be more of a mesh than a simple path, and new information is constantly being added, while knowledge no longer needed is gradually forgotten. The skeleton - the songline itself - is never lost.
Everyone in the culture traditionally could be a storyteller - anyone willing to learn and be initiated to higher levels is able to do so - encouraged to do so. So I can’t see why any adding knowledge to a palace would be seen as an individual’s palace, even if an individual did it.
I think the simple answer to your question is: no, because they can expand on the songlines already there whenever they want to.
Songlines, at a simple level, function just like memory palaces, but when used fully, they are far more complex, using a greater range of mnemonic techniques than we tend to do with our memory palaces. I am involved in a major research project including researchers from four universities looking at the differences. We will start to write that up this year.
The method of loci and sung narrative trails (songlines are the Australian Aboriginal version) are now part of our final year high school Psychology course in my state as of this year. So these ideas are infiltrating education!
Interesting question. I must ponder it further!
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Thanks, Lynne!
Just to make sure I explained myself, what I’m thinking of is the same way we use memory palaces. We (“Westerners”) use them for our own knowledge, rather than for community knowledge.
So, we create them for our tests in school, our personal knowledge interests, shopping lists, etc. Our palaces never enter the collective consciousness.
So, the affirmative to my question would be something like an elder indigenous person telling a young person, “Hey, you know how we do Songlines? Yeah, you can use the same techniques for your shopping list.”
Thanks for you time! I’m a huge fan! 
BTW, you’re a big influence on my youtube channel I recently launched. My goal is to deliver knowledge in “story” form and provide viewers with memory palaces that go over the points in the video. It’s a work in progress and I need to refine what I’m doing but I just wanted to say thanks!!!
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Hi QiJitsu,
Thank you for the lovely complements and all the very best for your YouTube channel.
Not everything in oral tradition is communal for everyone. A healer may have their own healing knowledge, for example, but I am led to believe that everything and everyone has a location in Country. So I suspect individuals would just use the place assigned to that knowledge or the person they associate the teaching with. But the idea of being ‘individual’ isn’t really as strong as in Western cultures - as best I understand it. The reason I am being vague is that the various cultures differ, and there are so many of them! So this may not be something I can generalise about.
As there are very few Elders still living a fully traditional lifestyle, as writing has been taken up almost everywhere, I am not sure that the answer is out there.
I will ask my co-author on Songlines when I next talk to her.
Interesting question!
Lynne
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Thanks, Lynne!