I’ve been thinking again a fair bit about Indigenous songlines these past few weeks.

A few years ago I became compelled by songlines – variations of which have long been known as churinga and Dreaming tracks – after travelling partially along one, with Yolngu guides, into the Arafura Sea from north-east Arnhem Land.

And I started reading about them again as I geared up to review a wonderful exhibition about songlines at the National Museum of Australia. That meant a fourth reading of Englishman Bruce Chatwin’s 1987 novel The Songlines and a terrific recent essay by Richard Cooke in The Monthly, assessing the book’s currency 30 years on.

Chatwin introduced “songlines” into the lexicon to simply describe a very complex Indigenous cosmology that had engaged anthropologists in Australia for at least a century.

Chatwin’s best-selling, critically lauded The Songlines followed two lightning trips to central and northern Australia a few years earlier. Obsessed with nomad-ism, he conjured a reclusive autodidact anthropologist, Arkady, to familiarise his none too fictional “I” with songlines.

This robustly “classic” novel conveys early through a conversation between its protagonists, what Chatwin determined a songline to be.

Arkady described how “each totemic ancestor, while travelling through the country, was thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the line of his footprints and how these Dreaming-tracks lay over the land as ‘ways’ of communication between the most far-flung tribes”.

“‘A song’, he said, ‘was both map and direction-finder. Providing you knew the song, you could always find your way across country.’”

English language can’t convey so much about Indigenous worlds. Indigenous creationism – whereby ancestral beings (animals and humans) made the land and, simultaneously, their stories, as they traversed it – baffles outsiders. But Chatwin’s, reductive, partial take on what pioneering anthropologists had long called “Dreaming tracks” opened a window onto the other – not least here in Australia where white engagement with Indigenous culture and belief remains culpably wanting.

Thirty years after The Songlines, Chatwin’s legacy on the Indigenous Australian front is under critical evaluation from the academy to the national museum, with its groundbreaking songlines exhibition.

Chatwin, a former Sotheby’s art valuer who launched himself as a genre-shifting travel writer with his columns for The Sunday Times and his acclaimed first (non-fiction) book, In Patagonia, was a divisive, intriguing figure during his Australian travels. Several people I know who encountered him in Australia during the 1980s said their memories of Chatwin – who died in 1989 – were not positive.

In some remote communities there’s a saying: “fly-flo” journalists and authors, anthropologists and church people, travellers seeking Zen and general do-gooders, are “just like plastic bags” – they blow in, flap around in the wind making noise, and blow out again leaving nothing.

Chatwin’s reputation as one of the finest travel writers, novelists and non-fiction authors of his generation (despite ultimately publishing only five books before his death at 48 in 1989) certainly preceded him.

With his accent and his socks and sandals, his satchel of little bespoke notebooks, he was certainly conspicuous. A friend of mine who encountered him in Alice Springs recalled that Chatwin might’ve exuded mesmerising charm, but he also imparted the impression of someone who “took” considerably while leaving little – no tracks, no lines – behind.

Which hardly rates him as a rarity amongst novelists.

Others remember him far more fondly, of course. Few would deny his enviable talent.

Indigenous people, especially, perhaps, those of the remote centre and north, are canny, wary of intruders and intensely resourceful. They sense the “takers” coming miles off. They do not readily surrender agency. Their approach tends to be correspondingly transactional.

So it is that songlines, the word if not the novel, is embraced by many Indigenous elders to describe Chatwin’s flawed evocation of their indefinable cosmological/spirtual/religious beliefs and phenomena.

Chatwin and his legacy hover about the museum’s exhibition, Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters, not unlike the show’s giant, woven effigies of the namesake siblings flying into the night sky to escape their lusty shape shifting pursuer, Wati Nyiru.

In an essay to accompany the show, Australian archaeologist Mike Smith writes, “The only time I am given a linear narrative is when I travel along an individual Dreaming track. ‘Being on country’, it seems, is crucial to telling the mythologies. After 40 years of this, I begin to see that it forms a system of belief, a world view, and one of the world’s great religions.”

He writes how Chatwin’s “bowdlerised version . . . escaped into the public domain, eclipsing an earlier anthropological lexicon, and quickly colonised the arts and humanities”.

“By 1990 the term was endemic . . . In anthropological thought, however, the idea of songlines has much earlier antecedents, and a different nomenclature.”

The Songlines, which I first read about 1990, was instrumental to my awakening about Indigenous spiritual belief and creationism. After some travel – including along that Dreaming track in the Arafura Sea – many conversations with Indigenous people and familiarisation with writings by various anthropologists and native title experts, I came to realise “songlines” could be much more than that to which Chatwin had introduced me.

They reference the cultural, political, spiritual, ecological, geographical, historical (and more) wisdom archived in the land. They embody stories of the ancestors’ creation of country itself (a serpent or snake might make a river, an emu or a lizard, through their eggs, the boulders on an escarpment, for example, that becomes their story, too). Dreaming tracks are a spiritual belief system. I’d contest they are also a akin to a form of mapping – stories about the land, stars and water, that, yes, understood, spoken or sung, can be a navigational aid.

I know of blackfellas (accompanied by whitefellas who’re usually driving) who’ve sung the land to navigate across unfamiliar country.

During that 2014 Arafura boat trip along the West Wind songline, two elderly Aboriginal women (one who’s since died) interpreted for me the land- and seascapes around the boat. There was a big red dog embedded in a cliff (it also created that landmark), whose permission was sought to pass. The rainbow serpent, which created and now guards, the hole in the wall (a potentially treacherous stretch of sea dividing the island, Raragala) also had to lend its permission.

On our return journey, when the whipped-up sea tossed our vessel about, we were urged to pray to the Christian God for safe passage. I found that, remarkably, the dreaming tracks of north-east Arnhem Land incorporated a God (who missionaries only introduced to Yolngu in the early 20th century) and, indeed, Allah, brought to the Yolngu by Macassan Muslims from about the late 17th century.

A little experience and endless talk – not The Songlines itself – connected me to such detail, whereas Chatwin had, I suppose, and thankfully so, opened my mind to that possibility.

In Beyond Songlines, an expansive essay in Australian Book Review, eminent historian and museum ethnographer Philip Jones writes, “Of course, every English term for an Aboriginal concept will fall short, but it is important to understand that while ‘Dreaming’ emerged at least partly from discourse between Aboriginal and European people engaged in performance and elicitation of ritual knowledge, ‘songlines’ arrived in Bruce Chatwin’s suitcase.”

The Songlines, Jones writes, certainly filled a popular imagination vacuum.

“Its durability over three decades suggests that a popular and accessible version of Aboriginal cosmology was always needed, at least as much as the terms ‘never-never’, ‘walkabout’ and ‘Dreamtime’ which constituted earlier attempts to fill that void. But these are poor substitutes for any term which derives directly from Aboriginal philosophical thinking.”

Of The Songlines he concludes, “Thirty years after its publication it is evident enough that Bruce Chatwin’s book was much less about Aboriginal culture or ‘songlines’ in particular than about his own rather strained efforts to find a universal human rationale for the nomadic, self-sufficient lifestyle he and his moleskin notebooks now represent.”

Regardless of whether anyone, Aboriginal or non-Indigenous, can agree precisely what they might be, “songlines” will forever be with us.

• Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist