The Songlines

'One man's impassioned song' is how the Sunday Telegraph describes this rare jewel of a book and a more apt description of it couldn't be found. It is truly one man's, one great artist's swansong to eternity and like all great works it has something to say to all of us.Billed as a 'travel book,' Bruce Chatwin's 'Songlines' is that in name only. Following in the steps of other literateurs who were also originally pigeonholed as mere travel writers ie. Conrad, Greene, etc...Chatwin magically transforms a place, the Australian outback, and a people, the 'aboriginals,' into the characters of a majestic cosmic play. In truth, Songlines is really an accessible and persuasive treatise on the nature of man, hiding under the guise of a travel book.Chatwin's thesis is simple: that human beings are migratory--'nomadic' is his catchy phrase--in their most natural (read here, best) state. To support this thesis, Chatwin follows the ancestral songlines of the Australian aboriginals who believe the world and all its creations were sung into existence by their semi-divine 'ancestors.' To reaffirm their identity, their place in this world and the 'world' itself, today's Aboriginals retrace the routes their ancestors walked across the continent, re-singing everything back into life. In mapping out this moving creation myth, Chatwin enlists the help of aboriginal 'expert,' Arkady, erudite son of Ukrainian exiles. With vibrant color, humor and sun-drenched clarity, Chatwin recounts their memorable encounters with the sometimes freakish, always original, denizens of the Australian outback.To support his claim of man as migratory animal, Chatwin interrupts these gem-like anecdotes with a vast array of historical and anthropological aphorisms, facts and commentary. While their placement sometimes appears rather arbitrary, these tidbits spice up the whole and provide a pleasant balance to the stories that surround them.Songlines is hard to put down as the effortless, pristine style carries the reader along on a voyage all its own. Nicholas Shakespeare wasn't far off the mark in crowning Chatwin as the 'greatest stylist writing in England today.' Even if you don't buy the idea the book is selling, the writing itself is enough to recommend it. Especially for writer wannabes. Every sentence is a cut and polished gem. Terse, tight and clean, all the fat has been cut off, leaving the choicest morsels. And what morsels! Not only does Chatwin say it exquisitely, he also has something to say. That's not just fine writing, that's art.And if the writing isn't enough, the seeds of thought that Songlines plants are tough stuff and unlikely to blow away all that easily. Chatwin makes a strong case that when humans decided to 'settle' down---to civilize themselves---they actually caused more evil than good. Settling down meant holding onto things and marking out borders of possession. And because our natural restlessness became inihibited, we learned to covet more thin

This is a difficult book to describe: it masquerades as a Theroux style travelogue, but is anything but. I love Paul Theroux, but this totally transcends his travel writing. Chatwin starts out describing a trip to the Australian Outback. It starts out pretty conventional, in beautiful descriptive prose...but before too long you realize you are actually reading Chatwin's brilliant ruminations about the human race as a species, where we came from, and where we are going. The book is NOT really about the Aborigines, though they provide a number of terrific characters, and I suspect someone who really wanted to know more about the actual Songlines could be disappointed by this book. He very clearly sets up his own views against those of many important and popular thinkers. To sum it up, he makes a case that humans are not really an aggressive species at heart, and that evolution has not really programmed the human to fight for power but to defend the tribe. Not every will agree with this, but he makes a wonderful case and the book is beautiful and crystalline and should be read by everyone.

Bruce, an English guy, heads into the Australian outback to check out aborigines, as part of his life-long interest in nomadic cultures. Part of the book is travel writing - the wacko Australian situations and characters he meets are fully described - part the history/psychology/philosophy of nomadic living and human aggression, and part a poetic description of Aboriginal culture.The link between a human sedentary existance and human aggression has long been described; Bruce presents sedentary living as an unnatural state, and the nomadic lifestyle as cleaner, more beautiful and better. It's very convincing while you're reading it, and certainly deeply interesting. It's certainly a refreshing counterpoint to thinking about all those land-related wars and situations (Israel, for example), to all the nastiness of European colonization in America, Africa, and Australia, and it has a certain intuitive appeal - land belongs to everyone!I'm not certain how accurate Bruce's description of Aboriginal culture is, but I don't think it really matters. This is not a carefully constructed sociological or anthropological analysis, but rather a lyrical, and fairly romantic, description of nomadic life and a way of thinking. Most importantly, I think, the message is: the ways the Aboriginies think and relate to the land are powerful and beautiful and so different to what we're used to that it's very difficult for Westerners to appreciate them immediately. I strongly recommend this book, because it outlines a way of thinking about the human condition that is nice, and that lingers in your mind for a long time.

William James said that to "learn the secrets of any science, we go to expert specialists, even though they may be eccentric persons, and not to commonplace pupils." It seems, Bruce Chatwin used the same method to shed light on what for him was the question of questions: the nature of human restlessness.The Songlines consists of the stories of the eccentric experts in the science of restlessness Chatwin met in Western Australia, and notebook entries ranging from Blaise Pascal's philosophical reflections to a meeting with Konrad Lorenz in Austria. Chatwin had originally intended to use these notebook entries for a book on nomads. He gave up the project but the entries reveal the man and his quest.In a way, The Songlines is Chatwin's own songline: a track which tells of what he found on his wanderings, and what he considered worth singing.

When I first migrated to Australia in 1983, I immediately started asking questions about the country's indigenous aborigines. For me, it was simple curiosity. New Zealand, where I'd come from, had imperfect race relations, but Maori dances, hakas, and creation stories were taught from primary level at every school. Like many "Pakeha" (white) New Zealanders, I had a part-Maori partner - whom I later married. In Perth, however, no-one I spoke to, including white journalists with whom I worked, could tell me what the "Dreamtime" spoken about in aboriginal culture meant. Their demeanour suggested the very questions displayed a lack of taste. Strange then, that it should have been a Briton who gave me my first insights - to have the boldness both to outline and celebrate the unique richness of Aboriginal cosmology, and to put it in the context of the great nomadic traditions of human life. This is beautifully written, wry and teasing; it respects aboriginality, but shows a lightness of touch rare in this particularly fraught field. Arguments have been made against this book on anthropological grounds, and on the grounds that no non-aboriginal person should presume to write about such matters. There may be merit in these points of view; I am simply grateful that Chatwin turned his brilliance to this subject. I find this book as illuminating and as life-affirming now, as when I first read it many years ago. Other books I can recommend, although more prosaic in style, are Geoffrey Blainey's "The Triumph of the Nomads", Henry Reynolds' "Frontier" and "Why Weren't We Told" and the official reports into the so-called "Stolen Generation" and the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. There is still a way to go.