The Songlines: Bruce Chatwin

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There is a theory that Chatwin really wanted to, or perhaps really should have, written a book about its author instead. Theodor George Henry Strehlow was born at Hermannsburg Mission, 130 kilometres from Alice Springs, where his father served as the Lutheran pastor. Carl Strehlow was an amateur anthropologist who became more and more invested in the culture of the local Arrernte people. At first he tried to stamp out totemic rites, but then allowed ceremony to continue as his curiosity increased. Although he didn’t attend these pagan happenings, he did document them from descriptions. To the chagrin of local whites, the mission itself became a de facto sanctuary for Aboriginal people fleeing the frontier wars. Ted grew up speaking German, English and Arrernte, and was adopted into an Arrernte clan. The 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.

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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. In 1972, Chatwin was hired by the Sunday Times Magazine as an adviser on art and architecture. His association with the magazine cultivated his narrative skills. Chatwin travelled on many international assignments, writing on such subjects as Algerian migrant workers and the Great Wall of China, and interviewing such diverse people as Andre Malraux in France, and the author Nadezhda Mandelstam in the Soviet Union. The book was a painstaking effort to fit the songlines into a unified theory of human poetry and song, linking them to the Old Norse sagas and epic poems of the Greeks. It tried to uncover some essential mystery of the human heart, and its unusualness had helped drive Chatwin to Alice Springs. He considered Strehlow’s book as “great and lonely”. But while re-reading it in the Red Centre, Chatwin tried to make out the accent-laden Arrernte stanzas of the songs themselves, and found his mind wandering. Chatwin enrolled at the University of Edinburgh to study archaeology in October, 1966. Despite winning the Wardrop Prize for the best first year's work, he found the rigour of academic archaeology tiresome. He spent only two years there and left without taking a degree.It was terrifying to see a man like him dying. He spoke about his legs: “My left boy is hurting. Can you rearrange my legs?” They were just bone, only spindles. He was a skeleton and his face wasn’t there anymore. There were only glowing eyes in the skull. 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. 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?) 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. Sono sentieri sacri che rimandano al mitico tempo della Creazione, o Tempo del Sogno, la base di tutte le credenze degli aborigeni australiani.

The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin: 9780142422571

In explaining how songlines work, James wrote in her 2015 essay Tjukurpa Time, of how Nganyinytja, a Pitjantjatjara woman of elder high degree, learned to read her people’s history written in the land. 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. Michael Liddle is an Alyawarre man with Arrernte links, and chairman of the Strehlow Research Centre Board. I ask him about Chatwin’s liberationist conception of songlines, and he is sceptical.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. . . The Native Cat Dreaming Spirits who are said to have commenced their journey at the sea and to have moved north into the Simpson Desert, traversing as they did so the lands of the Aranda, Kaititja, Ngalia, Kukatja and Unmatjera [ citation needed]. Each people sing the part of the Native Cat Dreaming relating to the songlines for which they are bound in a territorial relationship of reciprocity. Chatwin is admired for his spare, lapidary style and his innate story-telling abilities. However, he has also been criticised for his fictionalised anecdotes of real people, places, and events. Frequently, the people he wrote about recognised themselves and did not always appreciate his distortions of their culture and behaviour. Chatwin was philosophical about what he saw as an unavoidable dilemma, arguing that his portrayals were not intended to be faithful representations. As his biographer Nicholas Shakespeare argues: "He tells not a half truth, but a truth and a half." Lawlor, Robert (1991), Voices of the First Day: Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime, Inner Traditions/Bear, ISBN 978-0-89281-355-1