May 16, 1984: Chatwin poses for a photo while on a book tour in Paris. Photograph by Ulf Andersen, Getty Images Couldn’t you have experiences like that without walking? Why is walking so important to you as your mode of travel? Margo Neale is feeling proud. “Here we are,” she says, “250 years after the British set out to colonise and civilise us, taking our culture to the British – to teach them how to survive in this fragmenting world.” Neale, an Indigenous Australian from the Gumbaynggirr and Kulin nations, is just warming up. “It is our civilisation,” she continues defiantly, “that had the resilience to survive over millennia: the ice age, sea rises, drought, invasion, violence, all sorts of oppression and pandemics. So, this is us showing Britain we have the knowledge to survive – knowledge held in the songlines.” 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. Now, you’ve got to love that: a song that can tell a story about the creation of the land you’re walking – or driving – over, or even the sea, and the people who’ve traversed it ahead of you, and bring you safely to a destination where you’ve never been before, without an atlas or Google Maps. All you’ve got to do is know the song. 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.

The Songlines Quotes by Bruce Chatwin - Goodreads The Songlines Quotes by Bruce Chatwin - Goodreads

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. . . Chatwin believed that the walking or wandering started with migrations out of Africa as the climate changed.I tried to make conversation. “Bruce Chatwin found a copy of that book, Songs, so hard to get he had to go and see Strehlow’s wife,” I said. “She gave him a loose-leaf manuscript. And when he arrived, she told him, ‘It’s a pleasure to meet the only man in the world who’s read it.’ That’s what she said, anyway.” 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." Chatwin describes his ultimate objective, "the question of questions" as "the nature of human restlessness". 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. 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."

Songline - Wikipedia Songline - Wikipedia

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.Songlines". Port Adelaide Enfield. 17 January 2020 . Retrieved 10 July 2021. Song-lines are about the connectedness of Aboriginal space and our part in it and how it connects us to our country and to other song-lines... So we have connection to the land through the spirit. (Pat Waria-Read). James has written extensively about the importance to Indigenous and other Australians of songlines.

Songlines (Chatwin) - LitLovers Songlines (Chatwin) - LitLovers

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?”

A unique facet of songlines lies in their role as cultural passports, denoting respect and recognition for specific regions and their inhabitants when the songs are sung in the appropriate languages. This intricate network of songlines interconnects neighboring groups, fostering social interactions based on shared beliefs and obligations. The perpetuation of songlines through generations sustains a spiritual connection to the land, underscoring the concept of "connection to country," wherein the intricate relationship between individuals and their ancestral lands forms a cornerstone of Aboriginal identity and cultural preservation. As I was reading this work, I couldn't help but feel that it was at once both beautiful and transgressive. 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. 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.”