The Songlines: Bruce Chatwin

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The stories of the Songlines are part of the culture and spirituality of these mobs. They've been kept secret over long periods of time (tens of thousands of years), they may only be passed on to other members of the mob when they undergo formal initiation ceremonies, and the punishment for disclosing them to other mobs or strangers is often the death penalty. 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. It’s how we are made as homo sapiens. We are biologically organized to cover distances on foot. That’s what we did for tens of thousands of years until we started to use horses, of course, until the mechanical age. And I would not call it “walking” because it’s not going out for a stroll or going out for a “power walk” or ambling in your city. It’s “traveling on foot.” You are reading the world, learning the essence of the world. Chatwin always liked my dictum: “The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.”

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

Lawlor, Robert (1991), Voices of the First Day: Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime, Inner Traditions/Bear, ISBN 978-0-89281-355-1 That English teacher was me, and such was my introduction to two of the 20th century’s most original storytellers. Ever since, Chatwin’s books and Herzog’s films have been absorbed into the deep folds of my imagination, spurring my own travels, and informing my own writing. To this day, a dog-eared copy of Chatwin’s The Songlines (his exploration of sacred Aboriginal storytelling) is never far from my desk. And the mere mention of brown bears conjures Herzog’s haunting Grizzly Man (a documentary about a man’s fatal obsession with Alaskan bears). Even as I reread the opening paragraphs of this article, I’m slightly embarrassed to note the echoes of a Chatwin story or a Herzog screenplay. But that’s the power of great storytellers—their distinctive voices embed themselves in their audiences.Certain phrases, certain combinations of musical notes, are thought to describe the action of the Ancestor’s feet.

Chatwin | Rory Stewart | The New York Review of Walking with Chatwin | Rory Stewart | The New York Review of

Today, however, Chatwin’s fictions seem more transparent. We may not be too surprised to discover the journeys with nomads for which he “quit his job,” and which John Lanchester admired, were brief interludes in a period more accurately described as Chatwin getting married and becoming an undergraduate at Edinburgh University. And the passages, suffused with symbolic and literary resonances, that once seemed most impressive, no longer seem the most satisfying. His personality, his learning, his myths, and even his prose, are less hypnotizing. And yet he remains a great writer, of deep and enduring importance. I had never heard of songlines before reading this book - the fact that I've lived in Australia for most of my life and did not know this perhaps says as much about me and as much about the life of a white person in Australia as it does about anything else.Bruce Chatwin's book is ostensibly an examination of the Australian Aboriginal notion of the Songline: a song that relates a series of geographical locations ranging from one coast to another, tied to the (mythical) creation of an animal, that in a variety of languages unified by tune sings out the geography of the route. He explores this abstract concept through the agency of Arkady and a cast of other Whites who live and work amongst the Aborigines in the harsh heart of Australia, defending their rights and interpreting their rites. 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).

travel Werner Herzog: ‘The world reveals itself to those who travel

There's plenty of information about the Mabo case, but I like the history here. Read the short, second italicised section, the joyful account of ringing the island to announce the decision. "I have to go and tell my Mum." Wonderful! The Yolngu people of Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory tell the story [12] of Barnumbirr, a creator-being associated with the planet Venus, who came from the island of Baralku in the East, guiding the first humans to Australia, and then flew across the land from East to West, naming and creating the animals, plants, and natural features of the land.

Chatwin didn’t seem to choose interesting places to visit so much as he seemed to chase ideas that led him to interesting places. Was this approach something that resonated with you?

The season’s overall theme – “Who are we now?” – is appropriately ambitious, given the extent to which empire still looms over Australia. Monuments and names of white British men – some who murdered Indigenous people – still dominate the country’s commemorative topography. It has more monuments for animals than Indigenous people, despite the latter’s 60,000-year history on the continent, Earth’s longest continuous civilisation. 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.” 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. Before we set sail I prepared with Englishman Bruce Chatwin’s superb 1987 work of narrative nonfiction, The Songlines, about Indigenous northern Australia.

Songlines | Common Ground Songlines | Common Ground

Freedom of speech is not merely the right or obligation to agree with everybody else. It's the right to have your own say.Arkady says Australia would have been a very different place had it been settled by Russians or Slavs, or, indeed, any people with an understanding and appreciation of open spaces. Instead, it was the English, island people, who came with their insular ways, thinking only of colonial settlements in Sydney.