The Songlines

The Songlines
By Bruce Chatwin
New York: Penguin Books, 1988



A fictional journey across Australia to the core of Aboriginal culture turned into a quest to understand the nature of human restlessness.

Nomadic cultures, in this case, the Australian Aboriginals, were often thought to be barbaric and inferior in their way of life. On the contrary, the author suggested they had much to teach us, especially their intimate knowledge of and sacred respect for the land they live in.

Wendy said that, even today, when an Aboriginal mother notices the first stirrings of speech in her child, she lets it handle the ‘things’ of that particular country: leaves, fruits, insects and so forth.

The child, at its mother’s breast, will toy with the ‘thing’, talk to it, test its teeth on it, learn its name, repeat its name – and finally chuck it aside.

‘We give our children guns and computer games,’ Wendy said. ‘They gave their children the land.’ (p. 270)

More intriguing were the Aboriginal creation myths. To the Aboriginals, their Ancestors had sung the world into existence during the Dreamtime, when they travelled across the country, marking their primeval journeys with musical notes. These Songlines or Dreaming-tracks, also known as Footprints of the Ancestors, were inherited by the generations through sacred rituals.

In theory, at least, the whole of Australia could be read as a musical score. There was hardly a rock or creek in the country that could not or had not been sung. One should perhaps visualize the Songlines as a spaghetti of Iliads and Odysseys, writhing this way and that, in which every ‘episode’ was readable in terms of geology. (p. 13)

In the second half of the book, the author pondered on the roots of human wanderlust. In a leap of faith, he declared that the desire to travel had its origins in our evolutionary past.

I have a vision of the Songlines stretching across the continents and ages; that wherever men have trodden they have left a trail of song (of which we may, now and then, catch an echo); and that these trails must reach back, in time and space, to an isolated pocket in the African savannah, where the First Man opening his mouth in defiance of the terrors that surrounded him, shouted in the opening stanza of the World Song, ‘I AM!’ (p. 282)