Book Review: The Songlines

The Songlines

by Bruce Chatwin

(Thanks, Ash!)

A highly touted book came as a complete let down to me. Maybe my expectations were too high. It is considered a classic in these parts and a "must" read by the driver who takes me out to my communities. I wouldn't agree. Less the book and more the prose; we just didn't jive.

The entire book is Chatwin describing a trip to Australia - mainly in the Northern Territory - which he has taken for the express purpose of researching Aboriginal song and its connections to nomadic travel. Discussions with Australians, many of them Indigenous, give insights into Outback culture, Aboriginal culture and religion, and the Aboriginal land rights movement.

Interestingly:
Songlines, also called Dreaming tracks by Indigenous Australians within the animist indigenous belief system, are paths across the land (or, sometimes the sky) which mark the route followed by a localised 'creator-spirit' during the Dreaming. The paths of the songlines are recorded in traditional songs, stories, dance, and painting. By singing the songs in the appropriate sequence, Indigenous people could navigate vast distances, often travelling through the deserts of Australia's interior. The continent of Australia contains an extensive system of songlines, some of which are of a few kilometres, whilst others traverse hundreds of kilometres through lands of many different Indigenous peoples — peoples who may speak markedly different languages and champion significantly different cultural traditions. (wikipedia)

Even more than the book, I found the author to be fascinating.



          'But if you took him blindfold to another country,' she said, ''he might end up lost.'  

" The dry heart of Australia, she said, was a jigsaw of microclimates, of different minerals in the soil and different plants and animals. 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 world, by naming all the 'things' in his territory, he could always count on survival.

'Because he'd lost his bearings?'


'Yes.'

'You're saying that man 'makes his territory by naming the 'things' in it?'


'Yes, I am!' Her face lit up.

'So the basis for a universal language can never have existed?'

'Yes. Yes.'


"Wendy said that, even today, when an Aboriginal mother notices the first stirring of speech in her child, she lets it handle the 'things' of that particular country: leaves, fruit, insects and so forth. The child at its mother's breast, will toy with the 'thing', talk to it, test its teeth on it, learn its name, repeat its name--and finally chuck it aside.


'We give our children guns and computer games,' Wendy said. 'They gave their children the land.' "