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The Songlines

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In this extraordinary book, Bruce Chatwin has adapted a literary form common until the eighteenth century though rare in ours; a story of ideas in which two companions, traveling and talking together, explore the hopes and dreams that animate both them and the people they encounter. Set in almost uninhabitable regions of Central Australia, The Songlines asks and tries to answer these questions: Why is man the most restless, dissatisfied of animals? Why do wandering people conceive the world as perfect whereas sedentary ones always try to change it? Why have the great teachers—Christ or the Buddha—recommended the Road as the way. to salvation? Do we agree with Pascal that all man's troubles stem from his inability to sit quietly in a room?

We do not often ask these questions today for we commonly assume that living in a house is normal and that the wandering life is aberrant. But for more than twenty years Chatwin has mulled over the possibility that the reverse might be the case.

Pre-colonial Australia was the last landmass on earth peopled not by herdsmen, farmers, or city dwellers, but by hunter-gatherers. Their labyrinths of invisible pathways across the continent are known to us as Songlines or Dreaming Tracks, but to the Aboriginals as the tracks of their ancestors—the Way of the Law. Along these "roads" they travel in order to perform all those activities that are distinctively human—song, dance, marriage, exchange of ideas, and arrangements of territorial boundaries by agreement rather than force.

In Chatwin's search for the Songlines, Arkady is an ideal friend and guide: Australian by birth, the son of a Cossack exile, with all the strength and warmth of his inheritance. Whether hunting kangaroo from a Land Cruiser, talking to the diminutive Rolf in his book-crammed trailer, buying drinks for a bigoted policeman (and would-be writer), cheering as Arkady's true love declares herself (part of The Songlines is a romantic comedy), Chatwin turns this almost implausible picaresque adventure into something approaching the scale of a Greek tragedy.

The life of the Aboriginals stands in vivid contrast, of course, to the prevailing cultures of our time. And The Songlines presents unforgettable details about the kinds of disputes we know all too well from less traumatic confrontations: over sacred lands invaded by railroads, mines, and construction sites, over the laws and rights of a poor people versus a wealthy invasive one. To Chatwin these are but recent, local examples of an eternal basic distinction between settlers and wanderers. His book, devoted to the latter, is a brilliant evocation of this profound optimism: that man is by nature not a bellicose aggressor but a pacific, song-creating, adaptive species whose destiny is to quest for the truth.

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

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About the author

Bruce Chatwin

58 books632 followers
Charles Bruce Chatwin was an English novelist and travel writer. He won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel On the Black Hill (1982).

In 1972, Chatwin interviewed the 93-year-old architect and designer Eileen Gray in her Paris salon, where he noticed a map of the area of South America called Patagonia, which she had painted. "I've always wanted to go there," Bruce told her. "So have I," she replied, "go there for me." Two years later in November 1974, Chatwin flew out to Lima in Peru, and reached Patagonia a month later. When he arrived, he left the newspaper with a telegram: "Have gone to Patagonia." He spent six months in the area, a trip which resulted in the book In Patagonia (1977). This work established his reputation as a travel writer. Later, however, residents in the region contradicted the account of events depicted in Chatwin's book. It was the first time in his career, but not the last, that conversations and characters which Chatwin presented as fact were alleged to have been fictionalised.

Later works included a novel based on the slave trade, The Viceroy of Ouidah, which he researched with extended stays in Benin, West Africa. For The Songlines (1987), a work combining fiction and non-fiction, Chatwin went to Australia. He studied the culture to express how the songs of the Aborigines are a cross between a creation myth, an atlas and an Aboriginal man's personal story. He also related the travelling expressed in The Songlines to his own travels and the long nomadic past of humans. Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, his novel On the Black Hill (1982) was set closer to home, in the hill farms of the Welsh Borders. It focuses on the relationship between twin brothers, Lewis and Benjamin, who grow up isolated from the course of twentieth century history. Utz (1988), was a novel about the obsession that leads people to collect. Set in Prague, the novel details the life and death of Kaspar Utz, a man obsessed with his collection of Meissen porcelain.

Chatwin was working on a number of new ideas for future novels at the time of his death from AIDS in 1989, including a transcontinental epic, provisionally titled Lydia Livingstone.

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Profile Image for Orsodimondo [in pausa].
2,352 reviews2,315 followers
July 8, 2023
INUTILE CHIEDERE A UN NOMADE COME COSTRUIRE UNA CASA



Le Vie dei Canti sono sentieri invisibili che solo i nativi aborigeni riescono a distinguere. Attraversano l’intero continente.
Chiamate anche Orme degli Antenati, o Via della Legge, o Piste dei Sogni, ma anche Piste del Sole.
Sono sentieri sacri che rimandano al mitico tempo della Creazione, o Tempo del Sogno, la base di tutte le credenze degli aborigeni australiani.
Dal caos primordiale gli antenati transitarono al tempo della Creazione percorrendo queste strade invisibili, cantando gli elementi e ogni luogo: il nome di ogni roccia, pianta, animale nel quale s’imbattevano.
A ogni passo un nome, e una nota.
E quindi, l’Australia si configura come il “continente spartito”, nel senso di spartito musicale.


La “mappa” di Ipolera Herman Malbunka, l’ultimo erede del Gatto Selvatico e dell’Uccello dello Spinifex, custode del loro Sogno, del mito fondatore della storia della sua gente - nelle sue terre.

La tradizione di percorrere queste piste, più mentali che geografiche, più magiche che fisiche, è rimasta anche tra gli attuali aborigeni (quelli che sono sopravvissuti all’arrivo degli europei, s’intende), per entrare in comunicazione diretta con i loro antenati e la storia della loro terra. Per impedire che il mondo ritorni allo stato di Caos.
E così ogni roccia, o albero, o fiume, trasfigura, s’innalza a un livello magico e primordiale.



Chatwin si fa accompagnare da un ingegnere russo figlio di un cosacco, Arkady Volchok, nome che sembra uscito da un film di Orson Welles o da una storia di Corto Maltese.
Per incontrarlo comincia il suo viaggio da Alice Springs.
Lungo il percorso delle Vie dei Canti, incontra un prete che ha lasciato la tonaca, un pittore, una band rock, gente che vive in baracche sperdute, attivisti politici, meticci, alcolizzati, contaminati dagli esperimenti nucleari compiuti dai bianchi…


La ex missione di Hermannsburg.

Arkady spiega al suo visitatore inglese che:
Prima dell’arrivo dei bianchi, in Australia nessuno era senza terra, poiché tutti, uomini e donne, ereditavano in proprietà esclusiva un pezzo del canto dell’Antenato, e la striscia di terra su cui esso passava. I versi erano come titoli di proprietà che comprovassero il possesso di un territorio. Si poteva prestarli a qualcuno, e in cambio si poteva farsene prestare degli altri. L’unica cosa che non si poteva fare era venderli o sbarazzarsene.
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.


La Meerenie Loop Road, nel cuore dell’Outback.

Nella seconda parte del libro Chatwin ragiona sull’evoluzione e rimarca come il nomadismo spinga a un tasso inferiore di aggressività. Libro dedicato al nomadismo del quale Chatwin era esemplare vivente, spirito irrequieto ed errante forse derivato dal padre ufficiale di Marina. In puro stile Chatwin, un po’ racconto di viaggi, un po’ racconto di se stesso, racconto autobiografico della sua infanzia e della sua famiglia, un po’ riflessioni generali sul senso della vita, un po’ tanta curiosità per tutto quello e tutti quelli che incontrava di cui racconta storie, aneddoti, leggende.
E tutto finiva sui suoi mitici taccuini moleskine.

Profile Image for Trevor.
1,420 reviews23.6k followers
December 20, 2007
This is a book that is a personal response to whatever it is for white people to think about nomadic peoples with layers of meanings. It seemed to me to be a very honest book - the person telling the story does not try to make himself seem better than he is.

I had never heard of songlines before reading this book - the fact that I've lived in Australia for most of my life and did not know this perhaps says as much about me and as much about the life of a white person in Australia as it does about anything else.

It would be too easy to say that white Australia knows nothing about the history of black Australia - too easy to say anything interesting. Actually, white Australia knows nothing about the history of white Australia, so black Australia shouldn't feel too left out. We are much more likely to know American history than our own, much more likely to know about Native Americans than our own Aboriginal peoples.

The idea of songlines is fascinating, that by learning a song you are learning a map that might be enough to show you the way half way across a continent. People who don't live in Australia think it is a smaller place than it actually is - it is actually as big as the USA without Alaska. That you could learn a song and that would be enough to guide you across such a distance seems utterly remarkable to me.

A very dear friend of mine bought me this book. Ironically, neither of us proved to be very good nomads.
Profile Image for PattyMacDotComma.
1,682 reviews992 followers
September 17, 2021
4.5★
“He knew he was dying and it enraged him. One by one, he had watched the young men go, or go to pieces. Soon there would be no one: either to sing the songs or to give blood for ceremonies.

In aboriginal belief, an unsung land is a dead land: since, if the songs are forgotten, the land itself will die.”


Bruce Chatwin was a highly regarded English writer and traveller with a deep curiosity about nomadic people. He was fascinated by the idea of songlines around the world that tell the story of the land, and he wrote this book as a fiction, but using his own name as the narrator. How much is first-hand experience, or researched or simply imagined, I have no idea.

Our narrator, Bruce, teams up with Arkady Volchok, a young man of Russian background who is working in the various remote, hot Aboriginal communities, where he knows and is trusted by the people and their families. He is genuinely fond of the individuals and adapts easily to their non-European sense of time and urgency.

When Bruce and Arkady pull up in the Toyota to meet people who are scheduled to meet them to visit the next community, they find the people asleep in the heat of the day. Bruce is a bemused by their casual attitude, but he’s equally bemused by the fact that an Aboriginal woman can simply wake up, grab a hat (maybe), and be ready to go. He knows how long he’d have to wait for any other woman of his acquaintance to get ready to travel, possibly spending the night away from home.

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.

This reminded me of a Nicolas Rothwell book of short stories, Quicksilver, which I read last year (and reviewed: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) Rothwell’s background was Australian and Czech, and I got the impression he might have agreed with Arkady.

The storytelling and anecdotes are most entertaining for anyone interested in this side of Australian history and life. It fascinates me how much has changed in the last few generations of the families of Aboriginal friends and how much is so rapidly being lost, in spite of some real efforts to keep the knowledge alive.

It may be impossible because of the restrictions on which people are allowed to hold which knowledge (which tribe, which age group, male or female), and how this information is allowed to be shared between tribes. [I use the term “tribe” because Chatwin does. There are many words used to describe different Aboriginal groups, but each has a different emphasis on who belongs to it. And there are even more language groups.]

Language and lore and laws are all being diluted. Not only is “civilisation” bulldozing and concreting over sacred sites and landmarks, the young people are so immersed in European ways that they have not learned the law and the lore.

The Mabo land rights case was going on when this was written (from 1981 to 1992), and it was pivotal because it “proved”, through the oral tradition, the continuous connection of different groups of people to different parts of the island from who-knows-how-long-ago. "From time immemorial" is an overused phrase, but perhaps it's appropriate here.

Very simply, in my probably fractured understanding, the island itself is, or is topped, by a giant squid or octopus with tentacles running down to the sea. People belonged to each triangulated area between the tentacles, or as Europeans would say, each area belonged to someone.

Phenomenal! But what will happen if the knowledge isn’t passed on? If there’s nobody left to sing the country, will the land die?

To give you some idea of how Arkady explains songlines to Bruce, I’ll quote some excerpts.

“The mystery was how a man of Tribe A, living up one end of a Songline, could hear a few bars sung by Tribe Q and, without knowing a word of Q’s language, would know exactly what land was being sung. . .

There were people who argued for telepathy . . . Regardless of the words, it seems the melodic contour of the song describes the nature of the land over which the song passes. So, if the Lizard Man were dragging his heels across the salt-pans of Lake Eyre, you could expect a succession of long flats, like Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’. If he were skipping up and down the MacDonnell escarpments, you’d have a series of arpeggios and glissandos, like Liszt’s ‘Hungarian Rhapsodies’.

Certain phrases, certain combinations of musical notes, are thought to describe the action of the Ancestor’s feet.

‘So a musical phrase,’ I said, ‘is a map reference?’
‘Music’
, said Arkady, ‘is a memory band for finding one’s way about the world.’


From his notes, Bruce the narrator ends by saying:

“Yet I felt the Songlines were not necessarily an Australian phenomenon, but universal: that they were the means by which man marked out his territory, and so organised his social life. All other successive systems were variants – or perversions – of this original model.

The main Songlines in Australia appear to enter the country from the north or north-west from across the Timor Sea or the Torres Strait – and from there weave their way southwards across the continent. One has the impression that they represent the routes of the first Australians – and that they have come from somewhere else.

How long ago? Fifty thousand years? Eighty or a hundred thousand years? The dates are insignificant compared to those from African prehistory.

And here I must take a leap into faith: into regions I would not expect anyone else do follow.

I have a vision of the Songlines stretching across the continents and the ages; that wherever men have trodden they have left a trail of song (of which we may, now and then, catch an echo); and that these trails must reach back, in time and space, to an isolated pocket in the African savannah, where the First Man opening his mouth in defiance of the terrors that surrounded him, shouted the opening stanza of the World Song, ‘I AM!’


It’s a fascinating book, although I’d have preferred that Bruce (whichever Bruce) had skipped the inclusion of so many extraneous excerpts from his notebooks, many of which seemed there just to show us how well read and educated and thoughtful “Bruce” is. The story was enough. [That’s the reason I docked it half a star, stingy as I am.]

For a proper NY Times book review, see
http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/03/19...

For a recent article about how people are trying to preserve culture, see
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-04...

There's plenty of information about the Mabo case, but I like the history here. Read the short, second italicised section, the joyful account of ringing the island to announce the decision. "I have to go and tell my Mum." Wonderful!
https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/articl...
Profile Image for Jan-Maat.
1,633 reviews2,311 followers
Read
July 8, 2018
Despite the title this isn't really a book about the Australian outback, it is another book about Bruce Chatwin. We journey in search of him through the fictions he put up as defences. Everything else is background.

I read this and was utterly impressed by it when I was a teenager. If I was to give this book a rating today it would be a very low one, but possibly my reasons for this could justify rating it very highly as well .

From The Songlines I went on to read a pile of other books written by Chatwin not really noticing that the function of Australia and the Aborigines in the story is to prove that Chatwin's beliefs about the role of a nomadic lifestyle and men at the height of their physical prowess defending the home fires from predators in the evolution of humanity are right. Reading this book we are not objective observers of the words on the page instead the author uses the format of travel writing and the illusion of reportage to engage us in the narrative. As co-conspirators in his fiction we partake in the deception of ourselves. Chatwin never claimed that his work was true. Indeed after Chatwin's death it came out that parts of In Patagonia had been either invented or substantially misrepresented. Fact blurs into fiction in Chatwin's travel writing, perhaps it is better to say that the journey is inside his head, to pull the fact and fiction apart would be to pull the man's head apart.

The form of the book is a mixture of reportage and sections labelled as being from his notebook. The impression is organic, but of course a book is a created thing, designed to create a reading experience. The most egregious example of this is when Chatwin describes himself stopping to give an old tramp some money outside his club and the tramp quickly describes his nomadic existence and philosophy of life using the same metaphor of a bird that lies long distances over seas, lands briefly, before turning round to fly long distances over many seas again, a behaviour that Chatwin himself had discussed only a few pages earlier.

In the odd way that life and fiction do come together, the depressed existence of the Aborigines that Chatwin meets in hindsight seems to foreshadow his own death. Here where the people who, he felt, were closest in their traditional nomadic lifestyles to prehistoric man, cut off from their traditional routes and as a result dying in every way as though the circulation of the blood in the body and the person through the landscape were one. Two years after the publication of this book his own journey was also to come to an end. In line with the rest of his life while dying of AIDS he claimed that the symptoms he was suffering from were in fact the result of being bitten by a Chinese bat. The truth was perhaps just a little too prosaic for Chatwin.
Profile Image for Rosemary Atwell.
458 reviews38 followers
May 4, 2024
Rereading ‘The Songlines’ after thirty years is a moving experience. I had forgotten how beguiling Chatwin’s writing is and how his unreliable narration perfectly suits the type of tale that he wishes to tell. His characters are Dickensian, his protagonist both charmingly arch and ferociously erudite. His death, a mere two years after publication, came as a shock, as did Nicholas Shakespeare’s biography (still one of the best that I’ve read).

The book’s middle and latter sections - quotations, musings, anecdotes, memories and theories about the origin and development of man, are even stronger than the main travel narrative, and, arguably, more rewarding. Although at the time they could be viewed as self-indulgent literary and anthropological posturing, it now becomes clear that this was very likely to be Chatwin’s last opportunity to sift and clarify his thoughts for posterity. Whether his posthumous life has revealed a master or monster must be the individual reader’s decision.
Profile Image for Warwick.
917 reviews15.1k followers
April 27, 2022
I think what I enjoyed most about this book – and I did enjoy it, a lot – was its strange, shifting form. A messy mille-feuille of travel literature, anthropology, fiction and diaries, it makes only minimal attempts to blend these aspects together, simply reeling off great sections of them each in turn. It begins in Alice Springs with Chatwin embarking on a quest to understand Aboriginal songlines, detours into stretches of memoir from his earlier travels, and finally breaks down completely into scattered notes and extracts from his journals.

Or so, at least, he claims. Chatwin's tendency to embellish the truth has perhaps been overstated, but this is obviously not meant to be taken as a textbook (and says so itself on more than one occasion). But it is, equally obviously, accurate to Chatwin's experience on the points that matter. In 1987 this flexible approach to veracity perhaps seemed more unfamiliar, but now The Songlines looks like a perfectly comfortable example of what's generally corralled under the vague genres of ‘life writing’ or ‘creative non-fiction’.

What's presented as the main focus – i.e. Chatwin's explorations of central Australia – is actually the layer of the book I found least exciting. The quickfire dialogue and endless cascade of new characters struck me as a little too breathless, a little too parodic. The first time he starts talking about Vienna, or Mauritania, or whatever, I kind of blinked in irritation – Hang on, wasn't I supposed to be reading about Australia here? – but gradually, as these sections intruded more and more, and his underlying theme (of man's nomadic instinct) became clearer, I started to go with it. In fact I found it riveting.

But my favourite parts were the supposedly raw extracts from his journals. These fractured sentences, quotations and scraps of memory are a bit like the cetology sections of Moby-Dick, except that where in Melville I found them rather insurmountable, here they were inspiring. In these disparate citations and half-formed ideas, I felt I could make out the real book – the ideal book, as it exists in the author's head, before he ruins it by actually writing it down – somehow preserved better than I've ever seen before.

Mostly, though, it's just really great to follow a writer as he struggles to get to grips with some deep thinking on big subjects. It sometimes put me in mind of Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (one of my very favourite books), even if Chatwin doesn't quite plumb the depths that West did. (The two writers knew each other a little; when Chatwin wrote his first book about Patagonia, West apparently paid him the majestically back-handed compliment of saying that his photographs were so good, they rendered his entire text superfluous.)

If you come to this looking for a sort of literary guide to the Australian outback, or a handbook of Aboriginal mythology, or even a coherent travel narrative, you might easily be disappointed. But if you like essayistic flair, witty and informed reportage, dilettantish leaps of multidisciplinary logic, and following someone who looked at the world with an infinite and articulate curiosity, then Chatwin is almost perfect.
Profile Image for Daren.
1,474 reviews4,515 followers
March 6, 2021
Many years ago, I read Chatwin's In Patagonia, and found it, I suppose, hard work and a little tiresome. And so I waited a long time before I picked The Songlines off my shelf. I had looked through some reviews before reading it - and found that they were polarising. In very general terms, those who enjoy a more philosophical or whimsical read tended to rate high and enjoy it; those who had read it to learn details about the Aboriginal culture were disappointed. On this basis, with my antipathy for philosophical ramblings, I was quite prepared to give it 50 pages, DNF and move on, having cleared a small space on a shelf, quite happy to sell this book on or give it away.

This book was a surprise. It was not at all what I expected, and up to page 182 (my edition), I enjoyed it a lot. Then, it became and jumble of fragmented thoughts, collected over years of travel in far flung places, all sort of themed and sort of connected. This blew apart the narrative we were tracking on, interrupted the flow, and caused me to skim and skip, seeking out the short sections which continued the story.

I wasn't expecting the primary narrative to be almost a diary of 'what Chatwin did' while in Western Australia. A catalogue of his interactions, observations, conversations and thoughts, but that is exactly what is was. How much of it is true, in context, and without omissions we will never know, but I found it a very easy read, largely very amusing, and reasonably legitimate sounding when it came to the Aboriginal information. It couldn't have been less academic; the style was casual.

There is little more I want to cover in this review. Up until the narrative was interrupted, I was five stars into this book. Having to skip through looking to clean up the last crumbs of the story lost it a star. It felt experimental - if it was, it was a failure for me. This was despite some of the tidbits being interesting - they just didn't fit in the location they were inserted.

so 5 stars, losing 1.
4 stars.
Profile Image for Ian "Marvin" Graye.
927 reviews2,569 followers
October 11, 2023
CRITIQUE:

Beautiful, Yet Transgressive

As I was reading this work, I couldn't help but feel that it was at once both beautiful and transgressive.

Beautiful, because of the lucid use of (the English) language. Transgressive, because it sought to translate, explain and reveal secret stories of indigenous tribes or mobs, without their permission.

Knowledge is Sacred

The stories of the Songlines are part of the culture and spirituality of these mobs. They've been kept secret over long periods of time (tens of thousands of years), they may only be passed on to other members of the mob when they undergo formal initiation ceremonies, and the punishment for disclosing them to other mobs or strangers is often the death penalty.

Bruce Chatwin (since deceased) purported to respect this tradition and context, yet he nevertheless went on to reveal the meaning of Songlines, if primarily from an anthropological and literary point of view.

Paradoxically, I would not have gained any knowledge or understanding of Songlines (to the extent that I might have), if I had not read his book and googled my way around the internet. So I'm placed in the same dilemma: do I have the personal right to communicate what I have learned, or should I respect the privacy and secrecy of indigenous peoples and their traditions?

Stand Up and Be Counted

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).

Is it enough that indigenous peoples be represented by other people's politicians, public servants or lobbyists?

If they obtain a Voice, should there be any conditions on its exercise? Should whites have to listen to their message? Should we have to agree with it? (Do you only have freedom of speech, if we agree with what you say?)

Freedom of speech is not merely the right or obligation to agree with everybody else. It's the right to have your own say.

Songline Objectives

Chatwin sets out to achieve three objectives in his work:

1) he documents several stories or songlines;

2) he loosely defines what a Songline is; and

3) he argues that Songlines are a universal concept that transcends different peoples, cultures and times.

I'll confine this review to the last two objectives, which I'll try to discuss at a more abstract or conceptual level. I won't comment on any specific Songlines.

The Nature of Songlines

Indigenous peoples regard Songlines as the "Footprints of the Ancestors" or the "Way of the Law":

"Aboriginal Creation myths tell of the legendary totemic beings who had wandered over the continent in the Dreamtime, singing out the name of everything that crossed their path - birds, animals, plants, rocks, waterholes - and so singing the world into existence."

Their Ancestors were totemic beings or mythological characters, not gods.

Chatwin believed that indigenous peoples had an "earthbound philosophy":

"The earth gave life to a man; gave him his food, language and intelligence; and the earth took him back when he died...A man's 'own country', even an empty stretch of spinifex, was itself a sacred ikon that must remain unscarred...by roads or mines or railways...

"To wound the earth is to wound yourself, and if others wound the earth, they are wounding you. The land should be left untouched: as it was in the Dreamtime when the Ancestors sang the world into existence.

"The Aboriginals were a people who trod lightly over the earth; and the less they took from the earth, the less they had to give in return...

"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...

"These Dreaming-tracks lay over the land as 'ways' of communication between the most far-flung tribes.

"A song was both map and direction-finder. Provided you knew the song, you could always find your way across [the] country...

"A man on 'Walkabout" always [travelled] down one of the Songlines."


As an Ancestor walked down a Songline, he gave features in the landscape (like rocks and creeks) a name in song:

"He named the waterhole, the reedbeds, the gum trees - calling to right and left, calling all things into being and weaving their names into verse...

"The distance between two such sites can be measured as a stretch of song...

"The Ancients sang their way all over the world. They sang the rivers and ranges, salt-pans and sand dunes...wherever their tracks led they left a trail of music...

"They wrapped the whole world in a web of song...

"A man raised in one part of the desert would know its flora and fauna backwards. He knew which plant attracted game. He knew his water. He knew where there were tubers underground. In other words, by naming all the 'things' in his territory, he could always count on survival."


Life, the Universe and Everything

In a way, the Songline acted as an inventory of resources of value to the Ancestors. An Ancestor was "forever naming the contents of his territory."

For Aboriginals, the country didn't exist until they could see and sing it. Only then can it be said to exist:

"By singing the world into existence, the Ancestors had been poets in the original sense of 'poesis', meaning 'creation'...

"The man who went 'Walkabout' was making a ritual journey. He trod in the footprints of his Ancestor. He sang the Ancestor's stanzas without changing a word or note - and so recreated the Creation."


Aboriginals didn't conceive of the country as a block of land locked in by frontiers or boundaries. Rather, they saw it as an "interlocking network of 'lines' or 'ways through':

"All our words for 'country' are the same as the words for 'line'."

"The song was supposed to lie over the ground in an unbroken chain of couplets: a couplet for each pair of the Ancestor's footfalls, each formed from the names he 'threw out' while walking."


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.

A stop marked where a man had got to the end of his own country, and a neighbour's country had started.

description
Gunbarrel Highway

Human Restlessness and Wandering

Chatwin describes his ultimate objective, "the question of questions" as "the nature of human restlessness".

Why was Man, originally, a "wanderer in the scorching and barren wilderness of this world"?

This objective isn't integrated into the body of the narrative about his vehicular trip through the Outback (via the Gunbarrel Highway). Instead, it's addressed in extracts from Notebooks that he's collected over time, as he read and researched books in libraries around the world (pre-internet). The question applied to all of humanity for all of time, at least until we started to live in cities.

Chatwin believed that the walking or wandering started with migrations out of Africa as the climate changed.

He describes a migration path or track as an "area of territory spun out into a continuous line, as one would spin a fleece into yarn".

By analogy, Aboriginal creation myths suggest that a mob or totemic species is born at "one particular point on the map, and then spreads out in lines across the country."

Ancestors mapped their way out of their place of origin, as well as their way back when they wished to return to link up with their mob and take them to their new home.

A Songline wasn't just a map, but a mnemonic, an aide memoir. It told a story that could be memorised. It was just as much a story line. Like a song on a vinyl record album, it's also called a track.

In Love With This World

One of the anthroplogists Chatwin meets defines a true naturalist as "a man who is in love with the world".

By this standard, Chatwin was a true naturalist, and his book a work of true naturalism. The same can be said for our indigenous peoples. I hope they gain a Voice and that we listen to it. We have much to learn from them.



SOUND TRACKS:
Profile Image for Lisa (Harmonybites).
1,834 reviews385 followers
February 26, 2013
There was plenty in this book that irritated me, and at times, yes things that fascinated me. Indeed, this book is saved from a one star rating for the simple reason that I found what was conveyed about Australian Aborigine culture and their “Songlines” fascinating. When Chatwin kept to his personal observations of the people of the Outback, whether of European extraction or Aboriginal, I was riveted. I have to admit this book did what the best books do--inspire me to read more on the subject--but alas even fifteen years after this book’s publication there’s blessed little to be found on the subject of Aborigine culture easily accessible to the general reader--that you can find by browsing the neighborhood bookstore or library. This book is easily the best known.

I recently read Bryson’s In a Sunburned Country and Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, and both spoke of the Aborigines of Australia as one of the oldest cultures; it was claimed they had been basically unchanged since humans became a behaviorally distinct species--at least until European settlement ended their isolation. As such, they’ve long fascinated anthropologists as a possible window into human pre-history. Chatwin believed they’re a key to a past when humans were constantly on the move, prey to the “Great Beast,” a sabre-tooth cat for whom we were their favorite meal. The “songlines” or “dreaming tracks” are songs that mark routes which the Aborigines believe were walked by the Ancestor totems and must be followed and sung to keep the land alive. The very melody and rhythm of the song can mark direction and distance. Chatwin described songlines as "the labyrinth of invisible pathways which meander all over Australia and are known ... to the Aboriginals as the 'Footprints of the Ancestors' or the 'Way of the Law'.” So songlines are myth, law, trade routes and maps--even land deeds. Chatwin believed all cultures had their songlines, often preserved in their myths.

All good. The problem is I find Chatwin maddeningly meandering and unreliable. He himself said that. “To call The Songlines fiction is misleading. To call it non-fiction is an absolute lie.” He doesn’t distinguish clearly in his text between one and the other. Worse, according to the introduction by Rory Stewart, who admired Chatwin’s books, “he inserted images and symbols, from other poems, painting, and myths, copied other people’s sentences and structures”--and without attribution. Stewart doesn’t use the word, but by any other name this is plagiarism--to me a writer’s greatest sin. According to Stewart, Chatwin wouldn’t hesitate to distort and invent in the stories of his travels in order to call up parallels and allusions to classic works. The people who appear in the book are mostly based on real people--but let’s just say that even according to the man who wrote the introduction to this book, well, you shouldn’t judge the people by the portrait, and it’s probably kind that in many cases Chatwin changed their names and personal details.

The other thing that drove me batty was the section “From the Notebook” which took up about a third of the book. Chatwin carried his notes in moleskin notebooks, and considered them more precious than his passport. Unfortunately he felt the need to share excerpts with us--at length--that mostly consisted of quotations from other books, what comes down to lecture notes, and vignettes from other travels. This is mostly where he details his anthropological theories about the origins of language, the nomadic nature of humans and our predation by the “Great Beast” and what it meant for human culture. Stewart called Chatwin “erudite” but for me especially here he comes across to me as a poseur. He never really pulls his theories together. It’s all very scattershot. So, is the book worth reading? Sorta. I’m rather glad I did because the picture of the Aborigines intrigued me and left me wanting to know more, but I was constantly wishing I was reading a more solidly factual book on them.
Profile Image for Matthew Ted.
920 reviews944 followers
December 23, 2020
181st book of 2020.

Chatwin has lost his readership over the years, which I find interesting; I was reading about it the other night. Firstly, Chatwin’s blend of fiction and non-fiction raised a few issues when he was first publishing. My copy of The Songlines as “Travel”—this implies a level of truth: as soon as we read something that isn’t “Fiction”, we jump to presume that it is indeed fact. I read a funny anecdote about another one of Chatwin’s novels: he meets a girl in it and she is described as sitting around and reading Tolstoy, or Dante, or something of the like, and it transpired that the real girl Chatwin was describing actually sat about reading “trash” novels. For this reason, people were sceptical of reading him. I say, why not change what she is reading? A young girl reading Anna Karenina is far more romantic, and “truth” or not, we are in Chatwin’s world when we drop our eyes to his pages.

The closest comparison I could think of for Chatwin is something like a blend between W.G. Sebald and Christopher Isherwood. It is a novel of two halves. The first half addresses Chatwin’s travels in Australia where he is attempting to learn about Aborigine culture, namely, the songlines. I was very invested in the book at the beginning and enjoyed the personal elements, as I do with Isherwood’s books too. Chatwin meets a number of characters and slowly draws us into the things he learns. The songlines are a little confusing, or at least they were for me, so I read with slow and close attention. There were some great exchanges between characters.
“It's a weird country,” I said.
“It is.”
“Weirder than America.”
“Much!” he agreed. “America's young! Young, innocent and cruel. But this country's old. Old rock! That's the difference! Old, weary and wise. Absorbent too! No matter what you pour on to it, it all gets sucked away.”

This was really the heart of the book and what I wanted and expected from the book, being called The Songlines. My auntie lives in Australia and my father and brother have been out to stay with her and I have not. When the current pandemic is finally over (a distant concept), I am hoping to finally fly the twenty-four hours to stay with her and do some exploring of my own.

description
Photo from The Guardian

Sadly, the second half of the book goes a little off-piste. The “narrative” fades and instead we are assaulted with pages and pages of Chatwin’s notebook entries. I’ve seen a few people claiming Chatwin’s arrogance here, merely illustrating how well-read and intelligent he is. As I began the notebook sections, I disagreed, and adored reading his musings from different countries, and many quotes from other books and writers, but slowly as it dragged on, I changed my mind. Arrogance is the wrong word, but there is a certain nagging in my mind about the entries and how important they are to the novel. In fact, the second half barely returns to the idea of the songlines, instead, they are mostly Chatwin’s musings and quotes on humankind’s desire and need to travel and walk. This is something of interest to me, I am a nature-lover and walker, but its format made it slightly indigestible. Then, when I thought I was resurfacing back towards the narrative of Chatwin in Australia (and we do, momentarily) the notebook entries begin again, but now exploring the idea of violence, predators, and humankind’s desire to kill one another throughout history. Again, this is interesting to me. Interestingly though, these things lost all interest because I felt I was just walking in circles, or rather, walking away from where I wanted to be. Chatwin led us to Australia and made us interested in the place and the songlines, and then before we knew it, it was as if he had had enough of talking about that, and began chatting about something else. We cannot interrupt a book and ask it to backtrack, that we weren’t finished learning about the songlines, so we are carried, unavoidably, further away from it. By the time the narrative returned to Australia and the characters Chatwin had befriended, I was too tired to care. A shame. On the other hand, if these two halves of the novel were developed into two separate books with less notebook entries (I’ll add: they were all in italics too; I hate reading italics in books for any more than 4 lines, let alone 40 pages), then I’m sure both would be a great success for me. I am not, however, unsure of Chatwin’s prose, which is clean and well-written. I hope his other books are more focussed.

I’ll end with something from Chatwin’s notebooks displayed in the book. It is a quote from an 1847 letter by Søren Kierkegaard (the Danish philosopher) and it is good to remember in today’s world:
Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it…but by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill…Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.
Profile Image for Marc.
3,293 reviews1,668 followers
June 24, 2017
I had great expectations about this book, it is one of the favorites of my wife and for years it stood temptingly staring at me in our library. But I'm afraid it turned out to be a disappointment. As in "In Patagonia" Chatwin reports about one of his journeys, a meandering quest, not in Fireland this time but in Australia where he went looking for the key to the Aboriginal-culture. This is a quite interesting topic of course, and the information he gives about the Songlines and everything that's related with them, is very intruiging and challenging. But Chatwin has made a very dull affair of his report, it is not more than a chronicle of his interviews with Aboriginals and other people. It could not charm me, especially because it was so self-centered: Bruce Chatwin is all around, and his seemingly easy way to gain the confidence of the Aboriginals wasn't really credible to me. And of course it doesn't help when you read in other reviews that he had the habit of inventing some of the stuff he wrote about (also in other books). Already before page 100 I noticed I began to read diagonally, and that is lethal. What a pity. But if I ever succeed in getting to Australia, perhaps I'll make another attempt.
Profile Image for Shovelmonkey1.
353 reviews938 followers
February 14, 2012
I am picky when it comes to travel literature. The curious thing about my pickiness when it comes to travel books is that I don't like to use travel literature as a way of broadening my horizons - I like to read it to narrow my world view and back up what I already know.

To clarify, because I suspect I have just made a strange and confusing statement, I only normally read travel literature which deals with places I have already visited because I want a back up opinion from the author. What did they think of this village/town/city/country, desert, marsh or mountain? Did they love it? Or loath it? Did they find something to admire or abrogate the memory of the place which was missing in my own observations?

I'm not sure about this approach or why I do it. Is it cheating to back up your own observations with someone elses? What if their observations were written many years before your own visit? Does that then change your opinion with hindsight, but not just the hindsight of a year... maybe the hindsight of 50 years and it's not even your hindsight but someone elses?

And this brings me back round to The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin. This book took me outside of my normal travel read parameters because I've never been to Australia so I have no basis for comparison. This amazingly insightful and brilliantly written book examines the dusty centre of Australia and the invisible Songlines which criss-cross it. Not a conventional travel book by any means as Chatwin combines observations with philosophy, spirituality and dialogue while contemplating the nature of travel and mans desire to move around in a landscape which is increasingly more determined to ensure that we are sedentary. Because I have never been to Australia this book was a songline in its own right for me. Australia sung into being by Bruce Chatwin. I can't think of a better introduction to a place.
Profile Image for Robyn.
59 reviews12 followers
July 30, 2007
The Songlines is, on the surface, an auto-biographical travel narrative. Under the surface, it's none of these things and so much more. The door in is that the "Bruce" of the book may or may not be the Bruce who is writing. The narrative Bruce's clumsy attempts to interrogate the Australian aboringine's sacred knowledge smacks of neo-colonialistic cultural tourism. Is the real Bruce Chatwin really this gormless or is he positioning his narrative Bruce to point out the problems of such a quest? The reader is led around in these rhetorical circles the same way Bruce is lead around in circles by his aborigine guides. We want to know about the mythical dreaming animals that dot the aborigine view of their land as much as Bruce does. "What's that over there? That landmass?" he asks his guide. "That's Shit. That's Shit Dreaming," the guide replies and breaks into hysterical laughter.
Profile Image for Joaquin Garza.
610 reviews721 followers
January 9, 2023
En mi panteón personal de escritores, Bruce Chatwin compite rabiosamente por el preciado título de “el hombre más interesante del mundo”. Su rival, por cierto, es Leigh Fermor.

Hasta el momento Chatwin lleva la delantera por un dejo de carácter byroniano y por un pelín más de glamour en su vida. Especialista en arte, viajero osado e incansable. Curioso y taciturno. Muerto trágicamente joven.

El libro es en su primera parte una narración del viaje que hizo el autor en las postrimerías de su vida para conocer la cultura de los aborígenes australianos. Yo conocía de oídas y vista (gracias Baz Luhrmann) algunos rasgos de estas culturas, pero conocer el concepto de los songlines (las líneas de la canción del título) fue revelador y yo diría que hasta mágico.

La otra parte es una secuencia en la que se alternan notas personales con citas y observaciones de otros viajes y otras culturas. El tema que fascinaba a Bruce Chatwin era el del nomadismo. En esta segunda parte vierte algunas ideas y conclusiones de carácter antropológico sobre las que no puedo comentar, pero que me recordaron un poco al famoso libro de sapiens. Lo importante de la postura de Chatwin sobre el nomadismo es la forma en que veía esta condición humana como una especie de modo de vida ético/estético/ascético superior. Sus ideas lo convirtieron en un adalid de la moda contemporánea de incitar al nomadismo que es súper tentadora: la autora de Destroza este Diario incluso escribió un libro que se llama ‘La sociedad ambulante’ y que adscribe a la ficticia sociedad una frase que el mismo Chatwin usa en sus apuntes: “Solvitur Ambulando” (“Todo se resuelve andando”). Y pues ahora todo es nómada, incluida cierta práctica laboral muy controvertida. Hasta tengo entre mis suscripciones de Youtube a un “Nómada de las Páginas” y a un “Nómada sin nombre”.

Esta segunda parte es el punto débil del libro. No sólo porque la colección de ideas, citas, narraciones y opiniones es muy desperdigada. También es muy larga. Y es tal cantidad de información que el lector se ve obligado a olvidar una parte.

Este libro es famoso también porque dichas ideas desperdigadas fueron escritas en unas libretitas negras de tapas aceitadas y con un elástico para sujetarlas. Chatwin cuenta la historia del proveedor que se las surtía y su triste desaparición. Este pasaje del libro fue copiado verbatim por una habilidosa compañía italiana que patentó el nombre de las dichosas libretitas y comenzó a venderlas poniendo la vida glamorosa de Chatwin de pretexto. A mí con eso me dieron justo en el kokoro, como dicen. Y ahora los diarios personales los escribo sólo en Moleskines. Ahí me ganó el marketing: cuando crezca quiero ser tantito de interesante como Chatwin.
Profile Image for Bloodorange.
798 reviews205 followers
January 21, 2015
I am in love with the structure of this book; initially, it describes a series of encounters with black and white Australians living in the nearly uninhabitable Central Australia. Chatwin's guide on this journey is an Australian of Russian descent, one of the many striking figures we meet - and I must add here that Chatwin was accused of the same sin as Kapuściński, apparently taking too much liberty with the degree of 'literariness' of his reportages.

Chatwin quite delicately (at least to my eyes) approaches the description of the Aboriginals (although they frequently come across as eluding understanding, before Chatwin starts to comment on his narrative). He does not mention the crimes perpetrated by white Australians on the blacks - the massacres, the unpunished killings, the taking away of children to 'reeducate' them. The whites he describes are a strange mix, representing a variety of attitudes toward the Aboriginals - sometimes greed, exasperation, and cruelty, but he mostly focuses on those who offer them nearly unconditional friendship and support.

The eponymous Songlines allow the book's 'surface level' to point to the connection between nomadism, land, language and mythology - all the scenes Chatwin recorded featuring the Aboriginals and their traditions serve to present them as a present-day model of the original nomadic society, which we fully comprehend later on: at some point, when the protagonist's/Chatwin's guide disappears for a few days, Chatwin turns to discuss the relation between people and the space they're in, people and predators, the nature of humans and human families, and the fears, needs, and coping mechanism we inherit from our distant ancestors. Chapter 30 alone - his musings on nomadism and human aggression - makes the book worth reading.
Profile Image for Rebecca.
856 reviews61 followers
June 3, 2011
I am a horrible reader sometimes. I read to just read, not because I like what I am reading, which at this point in my life defeats the purpose of it all. I am getting better at putting down boring books, mainly cause I use the library and I don't have to feel guilty about not finishing them because I didn't invest any money in the first place. But school kind of killed that for me and I hate not reading something that I started, no matter how boring it is. Two books I picked up from the library a few weeks back are this and The Songlines is one of them. Not that it wasn't a good book, it was just soooo boring! And dated. And it went off on a path that had nothing to do with the rest of the story, or title for that matter! Basically, it was about how Aboriginals in Oz follow the lines of the land that their ancestors lived through songs. (Or something like that). It was kind of interesting to read about the different peoples the writer met in the Outback, but like 3/4 of the way through the author is like, "Here is what I wrote in my journal in other parts of the world" and I was like, What the hell is this? 100 pages later, the book was over and I breathed the sweet sigh that it was finally over.

grade: N/A (I don't feel it's fair to grade the books that I find boring. There is a huge difference between bad and boring.)
Profile Image for Gijs Grob.
Author 1 book48 followers
June 7, 2021
The Aborigines' way of navigating, communicating and negotiating by 'Songlines' is absolutely intruiging, and I thank this book for shedding some light on this subject. For example, between chapter 14 and 15 there's a beautiful creation myth. I wish Chatwin had written more text like that.

However, most of the book is not about the songlines, but about Chatwin himself, eating and drinking with Australians, most of which have nothing to do with the Aborigines and their plight. Chatwin paints a vivid, if very shallow picture of the inhabitants of the outback, but is often close to simplification (racist white trash vs. noble savages). Moreover, as he insists this book is a work of fiction, I cannot grasp why he didn't write anything more interesting than this plotless book.

But it gets worse: after 160 rather aimless pages, the book suddenly disintegrates in loose jottings, as if Chatwin had lost interest in making something more ambitious out of his travel notebooks himself. At that point I left it, without finishing it.
Profile Image for Lemar.
700 reviews66 followers
May 20, 2016
Chatwin invests everything in this moving account of his research into the Songlines of Australia. Any relevant experience or research that might add to his examination of man's inclination towards a life of migration versus the sedentary life if carefully included. Going back to Cain and Abel, myths and archeology point out that ever since man first pursued a sedentary life and created the villages and monuments we prize in museums, there has continued to exist the nomadic people who just may be less depressed and anxious than city dwellers. Chatwin further argues that man's defining event is his victory, using only his brain, over the deadly predators that stalked our species during most of our history.
Profile Image for Annette.
12 reviews1 follower
March 17, 2009
If I was given a choice of 3 people to invite for dinner from any age, Bruce Chatwin would be one. I only wish I could sit down (probably in a pub) and watch him drink a pint and tell stories of his travels. He writes in such a compassionate way about the people he comes across in his travels, he has a way of explaining and understanding histories and events that is so intriging to me. This book is so loved and well worn...I underlined almost the entire copy. It is not only about the aboriginal peoples of Austrailia, but about all of us...it alludes to most every time and place and those things that unite us all and make us human
Profile Image for Simona.
941 reviews219 followers
January 15, 2013
Chatwin ha sempre rappresentato per me il sogno la fuga, l'evasione in posti lontani, l'idea stessa di viaggio.
Con "Le vie dei canti" ho viaggiato con Chatwin e Arkady per le zone Australiane, da Alice Springs a Middle Bore alla scoperta del popolo aborigeno, dei loro usi e costumi, delle loro tradizioni, del loro amore e rispetto per la Madre Terra.
Percorrendo le vie dei canti, anche solo virtualmente, mi sono trovata a vivere in un mondo fantastico, tra sogno e realtà, un mondo che mi ha invogliato a viaggiare, a conoscere.
Se pensate che oltre la lettura, anche il viaggio sia un modo per scoprire sè stessi, vivere altre vite, leggetelo e viaggerete là dove tutto è iniziato, nelle profondità della terra.

"Gli aborigeni credono che una terra non cantata sia una terra morta: se i canti vengono dimenticati, infatti, la terra ne morirà".
Profile Image for icaro.
502 reviews43 followers
October 19, 2015
Una volta, in un articolo, il grande storico delle idee Paolo Rossi disse che non sono state poi moltissime le idee originali prodotte dall'uomo nel corso della sua storia e che l'attività dei pensatori, nei secoli, è spesso quella di ripensarle ed essere in grado di riproporle come nuove. La frase mi è tornata in mente leggendo questo splendido libro: qui ne ho trovate - rarissimo - addirittura due o tre, attorno alle quali si arrotola e srotola la narrazione.
Forse le divagazioni di Chatwin sulle origini dell'umanità e su quanto è ancora in noi di quelle origini non sono nuovissime (ma faute) ma hanno, almeno per me, l'aria fresca della scoperta.

[audiolibro]
1,164 reviews143 followers
November 22, 2017
a wizard in Oz

You can never tell with Bruce Chatwin what actually happened, what he made up, or why he did so. But in every case, you're going to wind up with an eminently readable book full of ideas and intelligent musings. He was definitely an excellent writer, a wise observer, and a man of empathy and imagination. I don't think he could claim to be an anthropologist though, so in case you are looking for a book that would accurately set out the predicament of Australia's desert aborigines and explain their culture to some measure, this is probably not your book. Whatever insights he gleaned from travelling around the Northern Territory back in the 1970s does not amount to either an accurate or a complete account of Aboriginal culture. How true is all this stuff about `songlines' and so forth ? No doubt partially correct, but I would like to hear it from an Aborigine, if there are any able and willing to write. However, that is small potatoes. What you get with THE SONGLINES is an amazingly vivid yet simply told tale of Chatwin's travels (or what he wants you to think were his travels) among white bureaucrats and do-gooders, teachers, priests, nurses and social misfits as well as a few Aboriginal elders and activists with some kids and women at the edge. The portraits of all are realistic, nobody comes off as either an absolute villain or an absolute hero. Two thirds of the book is this. The remaining third strikes an entirely different note. Chatwin combines his thoughts jotted down over some years with notes taken in Sudan, Iran, South Africa, China, Mauritania, and numerous other places. He ponders the nature of Man, prehistoric and modern, how He became a wanderer, a nomad, a migrant, comparing us to animals and butterflies, connecting the development of weapons and civilization to this theme. He is really setting down his ideas on the nature of Humanity. It is interesting, yet ultimately this collection of ideas seems a bit too scattered to be entirely effective. Never mind. If you like good writing, if you would like to read of a part of the world not many people see, if you would like a private picture of outback Australia back in the `70s, you have come to the right place. It's a brilliant book.
Profile Image for James Henderson.
2,139 reviews161 followers
June 15, 2020
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.

That, apparently, is what Songlines is about. It really is a rambling, discursive, ultimately brilliant exploration of territory, nomadism, and the the origin of violence in humans. Perhaps it is presumptuous, but I find it both entrancing and intriguing. While Chatwin repeatedly engages in pop-anthropology of dubious quality, he displays a breadth of imagination and a willingness to share it with the reader. Some may consider his views a little arrogant, but this does not detract from their scope.

As a book, this is a rather strange concoction, but that is to be expected from Chatwin. I had no expectations and found a clear account of Australian travels. He adapts to his environment by plundering his accumulated notebooks when trapped by rains, setting down what is effectively his own Walkabout, the episodic meditations that become the real form and focus of the book.

Chatwin's worldview, based on Rousseau and amateur anthropology, does not appeal to all and the book has been controversial for his sometimes-fictitious accounts of the Aborigines. Despite that this is a readable and ambitious book that is also compelling as a travel book of uncommon style.
Profile Image for Maria Beltrami.
Author 38 books71 followers
April 19, 2016
Un po' romanzo, un po' saggio, un po' autobiografia, un po' libro di appunti e riflessioni.
Attraverso il contatto, privo di pregiudizi e completamente disinvolto, con gli aborigeni australiani Chatwin ripensa allo sviluppo dell'uomo moderno, ne definisce le tappe, ne riconosce l'aggressività e gli archetipi.
Zeppo di spunti per riflettere sulla nostra vita, impossibili da cogliere tutti alla prima lettura, e quindi da riprendere in mano spesso e volentieri, e sarebbe bellissimo che ne esistesse una versione con pagine bianche di tanto in tanto, per aggiungere le proprie scoperte a quelle dell'autore.
Profile Image for Roberto.
14 reviews26 followers
January 29, 2020
Mai letto un libro così profondo sul bisogno di viaggiare insito nell'animo degli esseri umani. Il testamento spirituale di uno scrittore meraviglioso morto ahimè troppo presto.
Profile Image for Hella.
1,036 reviews48 followers
December 16, 2023
Ik herinnerde mij echt niets van de vorige keer dat ik het las, maar deze keer heb ik er enorm van genoten!
Profile Image for Simona Moschini.
Author 5 books44 followers
June 18, 2019
Leggere Chatwin è una delle esperienze più piacevoli e meno faticose che possano accadere a un lettore, anche il meno scaltrito, il più pigro, il meno letterato. Le sue narrazioni, soprattutto i suoi aneddoti fulminanti, sono come haiku giapponesi: piccoli e perfetti. Scolpisce un personaggio con pochi tratti, come un ritrattista dotato solo di foglio e matita.
Il sense of humour, britannico ovviamente - e come fargliene una colpa - non gli viene mai meno, ma: attenzione. E' l'unico tratto, assieme a una cortesia da gentleman, a distinguere l'uomo Chatwin. Il quale si trova spesso, ne "Le vie dei canti" a fronteggiare inizialmente l'ostilità e il sospetto altrui nei suoi confronti proprio in quanto inglese e quindi colonizzatore per antonomasia. E di solito i suoi interlocutori finiscono per ricredersi, quando si accorgono del suo genuino interesse per le altre culture e della sua totale mancanza di superiorità da Uomo Bianco.

Quest'opera, composta di varie parti, affronta approfonditamente anche tematiche antropologiche (due in particolare ossessionavano Chatwin: il nomadismo e l'origine dell'aggressività umana) ma lo fa nel modo "dilettantesco", ossia non specialistico con cui C. affronta qualsiasi argomento, ossia con arguzia, arditi parallelismi (molto presente è anche l'etologia, il raffronto uomo/animale, ivi compreso il racconto di un incontro con Lorenz) e autentici colpi di genio.
La ricostruzione delle vie dei canti degli aborigeni sarebbe in teoria il fil rouge del libro, nonché la ragione per cui Chatwin si recò in Australia, ma non posso fare a meno di pensare che, al di là del genuino interesse per tutto ciò che vi era fuori dall'Europa, il desiderio di viaggiare e il desiderio di scrivere fossero i veri motori delle sue inchieste.
Altri anobiiani hanno notato che gli appunti sul nomadismo tratti dai famosi taccuini Moleskine, situati proprio a metà del libro, avrebbero trovato miglior collocazione tematica in "Anatomia dell'irrequietezza".
Non sono d'accordo: costituiscono a mio parere un intermezzo, un controcanto, una pausa nella narrazione del viaggio australiano dell'autore, che del resto è un'osservazione di come una cultura essenzialmente nomade sia stata stravolta da una stanziale.
Profile Image for Richard Thompson.
2,547 reviews143 followers
October 17, 2021
As many others have noted, this book is written as a personal subjective account of Mr. Chatwin's time in Australia. It's a method for getting at the truth in a roundabout way. It's clear that he believes that no non-aborigine is able to fully comprehend the signficance of the Songlines. They are maps in the form of songs, but they are also a form of land tenure, a treaty system, a form of literature and history, and they are deeply connected to spiritual beliefs and a way of living. But for an outsider it is only possible to name the these categories of meaning without fully connecting the dots between them. And if Mr. Chatwin himself is unable to get to a true understanding after months among the aborigines with great guides who introduce him to the right people, then it's certainly not possible for him to put a comprehensive and true explanation of the Songlines into a book for a popular audience of people who have mostly never even been in Australia. It's the problem of Plato's cave - we readers are watching the shadows on the wall, but even Mr. Chatwin is at best looking at the things that cast the shadows, and is himself unable to get outside of the cave into the light of day. Any observation disturbs the system, so that the government workers, the academics, and the aboriginal rights activists are no closer to the truth than the British travel writer.

Mr. Chatwin's answer to this is to be friendly and respectful, tread lightly and hang around with nice people in the hope that something will turn up that sheds some light on the subject. Maybe the truth can be found buried between the lines. It's probably as good an approach as any. And it makes for a better read than something that was more academic or more of an advocacy piece.
48 reviews4 followers
November 3, 2022
not terrible. not great, either - chatwin does not write beautifully, in general, and the overall tenor of his diction is prosaic. and he seems incapable about writing about women without appraising their beauty, or lack thereof. this sometimes leads to passages as bizarre as "She had level blue eyes and looked very innocent... Her breasts were firm and her arms were solid and cylindrical." fortunately of the two women Chatwin takes a liking to, one is already married and the other (she of the cylindrical arms) marries another character in the book.

but this text remains valuable for the unique perspective Chatwin takes of the world and its nomads. Chatwin is marvellously travelled, and he cites with brilliant ease his experiences in Niger, Timbuktu, Mauritania, Iran, and, of course, Australia. importantly he takes on an empathic view and not an Orientalist one. so we are delivered an understanding of the various nomadic cultures of the world - instead of tiresome judgments - and a much deepened understanding of the cultures and beliefs of the various Aboriginal peoples of Australia. one understands why Polo's voyage writings were so popular in their day: short of being able to travel oneself, vicarious travel is an excellent road to understanding.

to his credit Chatwin also presents legitimate insights into the possible nomadic origin of our species, the role of defence and aggression in Homo sapiens, and our innate need to wander. to do this he engages in some creative structuring (about 2/3s of the way in he flits between narration and interspersed quotations and recounts separate from the main body), which is successful enough.

if only he were a better writer. but you take what you can get, and once again what you can get is, i suppose, not half bad.
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