The Songlines: Bruce Chatwin

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Which wife? The crazy wife?” said the woman. I noticed a sleeping bag behind the counter. She was talking about Kath Strehlow. “She wouldn’t know what she’s talking about… Lots of people have read it. You’ve read it.” Is it enough that indigenous peoples be represented by other people's politicians, public servants or lobbyists? Non è difficile immaginare la violenza che ha significato l’arrivo degli europei, quanto le due etnie fossero distanti e inconciliabili: per i nativi, costruire, recintare, stendere binari, scavare miniere sono violenza alla Terra.

The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin | Waterstones

A glass telegraph insulator flaked into a cutting tool. An object symbolising either a tragic culture clash or Aboriginal adaptation and resilience. Or both. Chatwin mentioned in The Songlines that the “theft” of these insulators provoked massacres: “to put a stop to this practice, it was thought necessary to teach them a lesson”. Arkady says Australia would have been a very different place had it been settled by Russians or Slavs, or, indeed, any people with an understanding and appreciation of open spaces. Instead, it was the English, island people, who came with their insular ways, thinking only of colonial settlements in Sydney. Others were not so forgiving. A whiff of mild fantasy, combined with homophobia, and Chatwin’s denial that he had AIDS, have contributed to an aura of a tall-tale teller. He was one of the first prominent Britons to die from the disease, and latched on to exotic and speculative diagnoses, many fed to him by confused physicians. “My dear, it’s a very rare mushroom in the bone marrow which I got from eating a slice of raw Cantonese whale,” he wrote in one letter. He became an aficionado of his own illness, correctly guessing that it had originated in Africa. What is the Connection Between the Dreamtime and Songlines?". Japingka Aboriginal Art Gallery. 26 October 2017 . Retrieved 16 January 2020.

It’s a practical thing for me. It’s in the little closet next to my mosquito net and my canteen. Just the essential things that I would need. Bruce Chatwin's book is ostensibly an examination of the Australian Aboriginal notion of the Songline: a song that relates a series of geographical locations ranging from one coast to another, tied to the (mythical) creation of an animal, that in a variety of languages unified by tune sings out the geography of the route. He explores this abstract concept through the agency of Arkady and a cast of other Whites who live and work amongst the Aborigines in the harsh heart of Australia, defending their rights and interpreting their rites.

The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin: 9780142422571

The riches of The Songlines are varied and artfully stashed. Chatwin's physical journey over Australia's parched hide corresponds to his intellectual excursions, which are full of surprising turns. For its twenty-fifth anniversary, a new edition of Bruce Chatwin’s classic work with a new introduction by Rory StewartThe season’s overall theme – “Who are we now?” – is appropriately ambitious, given the extent to which empire still looms over Australia. Monuments and names of white British men – some who murdered Indigenous people – still dominate the country’s commemorative topography. It has more monuments for animals than Indigenous people, despite the latter’s 60,000-year history on the continent, Earth’s longest continuous civilisation. The character Arkady refers to Australia as "the country of lost children". This was used as the title for Peter Pierce's 1999 book The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety.

Bruce Chatwin | Books | The Guardian Bruce Chatwin | Books | The Guardian

A similar dilemma arises with respect to the representation of indigenous peoples, which is the basis of the Voice Referendum (to be held on Saturday, October 14, 2023). It is an imperfect book, and the fete surrounding its publication has moved on, but The Songlines did force the white world to gauge the depth of Indigenous culture. And it is partly imperfect because Chatwin too was overwhelmed by his subject. As he tried to make sense of what he had seen in Alice Springs and its surrounds over a total of nine weeks in the early 1980s, he wrote that songlines were on “such a colossal scale, intellectually, that they make the Pyramids seem like sand castles. But how to write about them– without spending 20 years here?”

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Do you by any chance,” I asked in the old secondhand bookstore, “have any books about Aboriginal ceremonial song?” Perhaps somewhere else that question would have sounded innocent, but not in Alice, and the woman looked at me for a long time before saying, “What, for 59 cents?” She had a hard, ironic tone, and a bandage on her arm, and right away we could both stop pretending. We were talking about TGH Strehlow’s Songs of Central Australia. That English teacher was me, and such was my introduction to two of the 20th century’s most original storytellers. Ever since, Chatwin’s books and Herzog’s films have been absorbed into the deep folds of my imagination, spurring my own travels, and informing my own writing. To this day, a dog-eared copy of Chatwin’s The Songlines (his exploration of sacred Aboriginal storytelling) is never far from my desk. And the mere mention of brown bears conjures Herzog’s haunting Grizzly Man (a documentary about a man’s fatal obsession with Alaskan bears). Even as I reread the opening paragraphs of this article, I’m slightly embarrassed to note the echoes of a Chatwin story or a Herzog screenplay. But that’s the power of great storytellers—their distinctive voices embed themselves in their audiences. She was a critical force behind the Ngintaka project – an exhibition at the South Australian Museum and an associated book about a songline stretching across Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands told by Anangu Traditional Owners. The exhibition and the book became mired in controversy and legal action after a small group of APY traditional owners, including the well-known blind Indigenous activist Yami Lester, claimed they were not properly consulted and that cultural confidences were breached. A man's "own country" was "the place where I do not have to ask permission to go through", whereas a man had to ask permission to go through a neighbour's country, i.e., he had to ask for a right of way.