The Songlines: Bruce Chatwin

Product Information

The Yolngu people of Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory tell the story [12] of Barnumbirr, a creator-being associated with the planet Venus, who came from the island of Baralku in the East, guiding the first humans to Australia, and then flew across the land from East to West, naming and creating the animals, plants, and natural features of the land. These two anniversaries almost seemed to sit on different calendars, the Intervention almost like a sinister parody of the non-linear conception of time explored in The Songlines. A small, dignified candlelit vigil stood outside the office of Senator Nigel Scullion, the federal minister for Indigenous affairs. (Scullion was up in Darwin.) The protesters were Aboriginal women and a few young bush-doof types, neo-nomads. Sono sentieri sacri che rimandano al mitico tempo della Creazione, o Tempo del Sogno, la base di tutte le credenze degli aborigeni australiani.

Bruce Chatwin: letters from a fallen angel | London Evening Bruce Chatwin: letters from a fallen angel | London Evening

I don’t agree with his way that people were able to move and travel free because of songlines. People were respectful of the movements that were incorporated within the songlines. They were movements of purpose.” It’s how we are made as homo sapiens. We are biologically organized to cover distances on foot. That’s what we did for tens of thousands of years until we started to use horses, of course, until the mechanical age. And I would not call it “walking” because it’s not going out for a stroll or going out for a “power walk” or ambling in your city. It’s “traveling on foot.” You are reading the world, learning the essence of the world. Chatwin always liked my dictum: “The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.”No, I think obsession is not the right word, but he had a profound, existential, curiosity about the world. He would follow a thread, and he would not be stopped from pursuing that thread and figuring it out. How did his death affect you? Did it affect your approach to your work? 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. A blend of travelogue, memoir, history, philosophy, science, meditation, and commonplace book…Chatwin’s astonishing style captures the metamorphoses of his own ‘Walkabout’….He takes the travel genre beyond exoticism and the simple picturesque into the metaphysical.”— The Boston Globe

The Songlines - Wikipedia

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. No ordinary book ever issues from Bruce Chatwin. Each bears the imprint of a dazzingly original mind. Coleridge once jotted in a notebook, 'The Prince of Darkness is a Gentleman.' What is so beguiling about a specialist predator is the idea of an intimacy with the Beast! For if, originally, there was one particular Beast, would we not want to fascinate him as he fascinated us? Would we not want to charm him, as the angels charmed the lions in Daniel's cell?” Songlines are passed from Elder to Elder over thousands of years. Many of the routes shared through Songlines, are now modern highways and roads across Australia. The famous route across the Nullarbor between Perth and Adelaide came from Songlines, as did the highway between the Kimberleys and Darwin. The Seven SistersThe publication of Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines in 1987 transformed English travel writing; it made it cool. For the previous half century, travel writing seemed to consist either of grim, extended journeys through desolate landscapes or jokes about foreigners. And the leading figures—such as Wilfred Thesiger or Robert Byron—in their tweed suits were celebrated for neither their prose nor their charm. But Chatwin was as attractive as a person as he was as a writer. The New York Times review of The Songlines ran: “Nearly every writer of my generation in England has wanted, at some point, to be Bruce Chatwin, wanted to be talked about, as he is, with raucous envy; wanted, above all, to have written his books.” Not only have I failed to make my young self as interesting as the strangers I have written about, but I have withheld my affection. 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.

The Songlines - Bruce Chatwin - Google Books

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. 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. a b Malcolm, Lynne; Willis, Olivia (8 July 2016). "Songlines: the Indigenous memory code". ABC Radio National . Retrieved 10 July 2021. 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.Tonkinson, Robert (1978), The Mardudjara Aborigines: Living The Dream In Australia's Desert, Holt, Rinehart and Wilson, ISBN 0-03-039821-5 The magic of The Songlines lies for me today in the central section, which records what Chatwin observed on February 8, 9, and 10 in 1982 with Toly Sawenko in Ti-Tree, Stirling, and Osborne Bore. The account is precise, understated, beautifully written, and, in an important sense, truthful. Someone as mythically inclined as Chatwin must have been tempted to portray Aborigines either as tragic victims or noble savages. But in his first glimpse of an Aboriginal settlement, he immediately shows us that he is better than that—much better than that. This is not an idyllic grove: The Bushmen, who walk distances across the Kalahari, have no idea of the soul's survival in another world. 'When we die, we die,' they say. 'The wind blows away our foot prints, and that is the end of us.' Only 500 copies were ever printed, in a custom font with special diacritical marks for Arrernte pronunciation. It was an incredible but charged piece of scholarship, and there were questions about whether it should even exist. It was a slightly sinister object that had attracted obsessives with bad intentions.