The Songlines: Bruce Chatwin

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By countering with even better stories. What was it like to revisit some of these places so long after he’d been there, particularly Patagonia and Australia? 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?” El libro es en su primera parte una narración del viaje que hizo el autor en las postrimerías de su vida para conocer la cultura de los aborígenes australianos. Yo conocía de oídas y vista (gracias Baz Luhrmann) algunos rasgos de estas culturas, pero conocer el concepto de los songlines (las líneas de la canción del título) fue revelador y yo diría que hasta mágico. 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. The staff were using the collection to map the songlines on Google Earth. It was painstaking, and Angeles showed me the results so far, careful not to reveal anything age-graded. The work was incomplete, but you could already see it was not, as Chatwin described, “a spaghetti of Iliads and Odysseys, writhing this way and that”.

Bruce Chatwin | Books | The Guardian Bruce Chatwin | Books | The Guardian

Later works included a novel based on the slave trade, The Viceroy of Ouidah, which he researched with extended stays in Benin, West Africa. For The Songlines (1987), a work combining fiction and non-fiction, Chatwin went to Australia. He studied the culture to express how the songs of the Aborigines are a cross between a creation myth, an atlas and an Aboriginal man's personal story. He also related the travelling expressed in T he Songlines to his own travels and the long nomadic past of humans. He named the waterhole, the reedbeds, the gum trees - calling to right and left, calling all things into being and weaving their names into verse... Dal caos primordiale gli antenati transitarono al tempo della Creazione percorrendo queste strade invisibili, cantando gli elementi e ogni luogo: il nome di ogni roccia, pianta, animale nel quale s’imbattevano. The man who went 'Walkabout' was making a ritual journey. He trod in the footprints of his Ancestor. He sang the Ancestor's stanzas without changing a word or note - and so recreated the Creation." 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.Le Vie dei Canti sono sentieri invisibili che solo i nativi aborigeni riescono a distinguere. Attraversano l’intero continente. 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 Sisters Relationships to country: Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islander people (PDF) (Report). Res005 [Indigenous Perspectives]. Queensland Studies Authority. March 2008 . Retrieved 9 July 2021. It may be impossible because of the restrictions on which people are allowed to hold which knowledge (which tribe, which age group, male or female), and how this information is allowed to be shared between tribes. [I use the term “tribe” because Chatwin does. There are many words used to describe different Aboriginal groups, but each has a different emphasis on who belongs to it. And there are even more language groups.]

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

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. Michael Walling, from Origins, invited Lloyd after hearing her perform a song written by her grandfather, Albie Geia, who led a 1957 strike (also misrepresented as a riot) on Palm Island in far-north Queensland. Palm Island has a dark history as a place to which Indigenous Queenslanders – including stolen children and those who committed the most minor offences – were banished. They worked and lived in terrible conditions, their wages often withheld. Diana James, a senior researcher with the Australian National University’s Songlines of the Western Desert project, has spent decades in the continental centre talking to first peoples about their stories and songlines.

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The notion of songlines was largely – and reductively – introduced to the UK and to non-Indigenous Australia through British writer Bruce Chatwin’s 1987 book The Songlines. Yet these phenomena are considerably more complex than Chatwin could describe. They embody the stories of ancestral beings and their creation of the landscape whose churinga (or dreaming) paths have wisdom etched into their every part. James has written extensively about the importance to Indigenous and other Australians of songlines. He did not much test his nomad theory on the “nomads” themselves, though. Pat Dodson (appearing as Father Flynn) got a taste of it, but the traditional men he encountered are shy and distant presences in the book. For Sawenko and others, this is The Songlines’ central failure: Chatwin had neither the time nor the inclination to approach Aboriginal philosophy through Aboriginal people, and instead relied on white intermediaries. The area where the philosophy seems most distorted is where it touches on obligation. Songlines anchor those who sing them in place, in family, and in kin. They are a source of constraint and rootedness, not just a siren song to go walkabout. But Chatwin was not looking for another wellspring of duty. He might also have discovered that his redemptive theory was not what it seemed. We do not often ask these questions today for we commonly assume that living in a house is normal and that the wandering life is aberrant. But for more than twenty years Chatwin has mulled over the possibility that the reverse might be the case.

The Songlines - Wikipedia

His clarity and confidence draws on an improbable range of references and experiences, mirrored in every dateline of his notebooks in The Songlines. He tells us he has been in “Picos, Piaui, Brazil,”“Djang, Cameroon,”“Kabul,”“Miami,”“The Night express from Moscow to Kiev,” Dakar, Senegal, Kalevala, Sydney, Sudan, Timbuktu, Yunnan, Persia, and Niger. He has sophisticated tastes (his notebooks are made in France) and obsessions (he claims, in letters, essays, and books, to spot and smell his favorite semimythical beast—the leopard—in Nepal, Kumaon, and the Hindu Kush). But he is a tough guy. Even Australians rely on him to make fires, change tires in the desert, fix roofs, and calmly rig up a ground sheet against snakes (or at least, so it appears). His comments, though laconic, are learned. This is a man who knows his Malevich from his Melnikov, and his witchetty grub from his caterpillar. And he does not have the anxieties of an anthropologist. What a Very simply, in my probably fractured understanding, the island itself is, or is topped, by a giant squid or octopus with tentacles running down to the sea. People belonged to each triangulated area between the tentacles, or as Europeans would say, each area belonged to someone.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. In aboriginal belief, an unsung land is a dead land: since, if the songs are forgotten, the land itself will die.” Homage, more than description, would convey the essence of the songlines, and the vehicle for this homage would be fiction. The Songlines was a novel, Chatwin insisted– he asked that it be removed from prestigious nonfiction writing awards on this basis– although based on real events. Fiction would give him the freedom to get things wrong. Instead of an attempt at the unscalable Aboriginal originals, he could compose his own songline, drawing from his old notebooks. Here was an opportunity to exorcise his failed “nomads” book, and expound on the theory that they were the “crankhandle of history”.