The core of Aboriginal Australian music is the oral genealogy of songs known as Songlines. A Songline is a route across the continent inscribed as song — every clan holds the songs describing the topography, water sources, sacred sites, and ancestral events along its stretch of country. This is not mere folk repertoire; the songs are indistinguishable from the community's land title. Since the 1992 Mabo judgement, Native Title claims have used Songlines as legally admissible evidence of continuous occupation. The instrumental palette is the didgeridoo (a low-frequency circular-breathed drone tube, restricted to male players in some Arnhem Land traditions), clapsticks (paired wooden idiophones), and the human voice — vocal chants layered over compound rhythms.

The Aboriginal musical tradition is one of the world's oldest continuous musical practices; DNA evidence and archaeology date human occupation of Australia to at least 65,000 years ago. Songs live inside Dreamtime — Tjukurpa, or Altjeringa — the ancestral timeframe in which the world was made, understood as a parallel present rather than a distant past. British colonisation from 1788 brought nineteenth-century massacres and the twentieth-century Stolen Generations policy (1910–70, in which mixed-descent Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their families), both of which almost broke the tradition. Remote communities in the Northern Territory and Western Australia held the practice through domestic transmission, and from the 1980s Yothu Yindi and the Warumpi Band brought the tradition into global view.

The didgeridoo is not a drone in the naïve sense — the player uses mouth shape (tongue position, cheek inflation) to modulate the overtone series above the fundamental. A skilled player uses circular breathing to sustain the sound for minutes without break, and imitates the sounds of birds, dingoes, and running animals within the drone. Yothu Yindi's 'Treaty' (1991) layers Mandawuy Yunupingu's manikay-style Yolŋu Matha vocal — two- or three-voice ceremonial chant from Arnhem Land — on top of a 4/4 rock beat. Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, blind from birth, has a vocal quality where Yolŋu Matha vowels resonate more roundly than English would.

Yothu Yindi 'Treaty' (1991) for the traditional-plus-rock fusion. Geoffrey Gurrumul 'Wiyathul' (2008) for a quiet solo ballad in Yolŋu Matha. Baker Boy 'Marryuna' (2017) for the current Yolŋu-language hip-hop generation. David Hudson 'Guardians of the Reef' (1997) for pure didgeridoo. Late night or early morning, ideally outdoors.

A didgeridoo is traditionally made from a eucalyptus branch that termites have hollowed out from the inside. In some Arnhem Land traditions women are strictly forbidden from playing the instrument, but this taboo is not universal across Australia — practice varies by clan and region. Yothu Yindi's 'Treaty' was written in direct response to Prime Minister Bob Hawke's failed promise, made at the 1988 Barunga Festival, that his government would sign a treaty with Aboriginal Australia. The song reached number 11 nationally in Australia and the dance remix charted across Europe the following year — the first time Indigenous Australian music broke internationally as a mass-market commodity.