The Songlines

by Bruce Chatwin

Release Date: June, 1988

Edition: Paperback

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Dying of AIDS and with Salman Rushdie, Bruce Chatwin made a lightning visit to Australia. The Songlines is the fascinating result of this terminal search for meaning.

The good points are that Chatwin's considerable intellect and narrative capacities weave a story based on year's travel experience. The bad point is that he knew almost nothing about his subject and as such has written an Englishman's compassionate contemporary account of the colonies.

I live and work on a remote aboriginal community near the areas Chatwin visited. Traditional Aborignal law is an amazingly complex oral culture so rich in history and symbolism that I have profound doubts about any whitefella ever properly understanding it, let alone a visiting foreigner desperately looking for something.

This is a great book, but don't think by reading it you will get a terrifically accurate profile of what being an aborigine is, whatever that means. They are not, as Chatwin seems to deduce, another group of nomadic noble savages more fulfilled than the more sedentary post-agriculture communitites.

An Exhilaratingly Complex Experience

Ordinarily, I say it is difficult to single out one book as significantly above others when I've read a steady stream of good ones, but THE SONGLINES belongs in a rarefied class. It has immediately moved into the pantheon of my all time favorites.

THE SONGLINES is a trip to central Australia, to Aboriginal country. In the 1980s, Chatwin found it to be a hardscrabble territory under an unforgiving sun, where the remote, sparse population mostly gets along in corrugated metal shelters. The sociological, political and economic condition of the Aborigines compares to that of the American Indian. Most of the white European locals don't quite seem to know how or why they have been plunked down in this weird, other planet. Hooking up with a savvier group of anthropologists and social workers, Chatwin looks for the songlines of an Aboriginal mythology, sacred paths spun out across the inscrutable terrain, each marked by a song that carries identity and connection to the prime movers at the beginning of time.

Along the way, Chatwin includes portraits of the people he meets, historical notes and readings of anthropology, evolutionary theory, and philosophy. In this far away land, he finds the stimulus that helps him organize a lifetime of readings and memories that come together in a meditation on the human need to travel and to make and share meaning. Looking at the contemporary scene and people, he can see back to the very emergence of humans.

Chatwin casts a spell you do not want to be broken. I suggest that if you do not know much about him, resist that strong impulse to start reading biographical notes and commentary on the book until after you have finished the book. None of what's out there will deny you its excellence; it just might poke a confusing hole in the reality it has created. The book is an exhilaratingly profound experience in the accessible guise of a pleasant, insightful travelogue. Ask why its author considered it fiction after you've read it.