While many of the lovers in these stories form the Cape York Peninsula found happiness, in and out of marriage, none of the stories describe freedom from the presence of family, community, laws and external forces. Perhaps, like Waiu Whap’s husband or Idriess’ lovers, true escape means running away to ‘somewhere else’. Somewhere else is the stuff of songs: ‘Over the rainbow’/ ‘There’s a place for us’. The stories themselves, however, express a freedom to feel and to imagine which is not limited by actual circumstances.

Foucault writes ‘The soul is the prison of the body’^[77] and Blake argues that ‘Man has no body distinct from his soul’.^[78] While Blake may accept the soul as prison, in the same sense that ‘reason’ is the bounded or outer circumference, he would also question this inherent duality. The inside and outside are not merely mutually dependent but more fluid. And, as Simon would have it, ‘neither the soul nor the body can be privileged as sites of freedom or the grounds of revolt’.^[79]

Songs of love are our insides coming out, as the songs in turn penetrate us. Sometimes our loves are rejected, opposed, disregarded, even despised. We can hide our vulnerability in the language of a mythic story, someone else’s words which become our own. Expressions of love in songs and stories can be independent of actions and circumstances. Songs express our experiences both real and imagined. Like love itself they tell the oldest stories newly lived.

The freedom to feel is not the freedom to do, and yet as an expression of our humanity it is essential. If our desires reach their limits then our imaginations take them beyond those limits and make possible an alternative. Our imaginings also show us the ways in which we are constrained. Potential ‘transgressive’ relationships may not be realised but remain a force for introducing new possibilities.