The Songlines: Bruce Chatwin

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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.] As I was reading this work, I couldn't help but feel that it was at once both beautiful and transgressive. What he did have was confidence, an unusual sense of purpose, and a reputation as one of the most talented writers of his time. Andrew Harvey, who reviewed The Songlines for the New York Times in 1987, began by saying that “nearly every writer of my generation in England has wanted, at some point, to be Bruce Chatwin”. Twenty-three years later, Blake Morrison reviewed Chatwin’s published letters by asking “Does anyone read Bruce Chatwin these days?” Chatwin’s friend Murray Bail, surveying this diminishment, says simply that “time is quite ruthless”. Chatwin is a disciple of Heraclitus. Talk about the ancient philosopher's view of life and change. How does Chatwin see the Aborigines as the exemplar of Heraclitus's philosophy?

Bruce Chatwin’s song Thirty years on, what should we make of Bruce Chatwin’s song

No ordinary book ever issues from Bruce Chatwin. Each bears the imprint of a dazzingly original mind.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). 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.” It’s a practical thing for me. It’s in the little closet next to my mosquito net and my canteen. Just the essential things that I would need.

The Songlines Quotes by Bruce Chatwin - Goodreads The Songlines Quotes by Bruce Chatwin - Goodreads

You can sense the Promethean promise he must have felt, encountering the idea of the songlines for the first time. Here lay the blueprint of the earliest forms of human consciousness, coming from nomads that, in his mind, sung the land into being. It was travel literature in an unusually unified sense. The travel was the literature, and this harmony was humane, marvellous, and irresistible to his sense of posterity. It was also an opportunity to collect something, and in the process show off his easy, trans-cultural rapport. In the cold light of the present, we can recognise these impulses as a form of colonial thinking, especially a British strain of colonial thinking. By 1987, this hangover was already starting to seem not just a bit embarrassing but also malign. How much of that imperial rapacity remains in The Songlines is a live question.

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

Uprising anthems … Australian musician Jessie Lloyd will begin a six-week residency in London next year. Photograph: Luke David Photography Which wife? The crazy wife?” said the woman. I noticed a sleeping bag behind the counter. She was talking about Kath Strehlow. “She wouldn’t know what she’s talking about… Lots of people have read it. You’ve read it.” he argues that Songlines are a universal concept that transcends different peoples, cultures and times. The Songlines shouldn't be just an anthropological footnote, but a part of Australian history as it is taught in schools. To tell the real story of this continent, you've got to have both histories. They are held in different ways, told in different ways, but are essentially complementary. To really belong to this place, you've got to embrace the Songlines. They are the story of this land. — Margot Neale The Mabo land rights case was going on when this was written (from 1981 to 1992), and it was pivotal because it “proved”, through the oral tradition, the continuous connection of different groups of people to different parts of the island from who-knows-how-long-ago. "From time immemorial" is an overused phrase, but perhaps it's appropriate here.

With all the travel lockdowns, do you still have projects in far-flung places?

In explaining how songlines work, James wrote in her 2015 essay Tjukurpa Time, of how Nganyinytja, a Pitjantjatjara woman of elder high degree, learned to read her people’s history written in the land. 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. Desert-sympathetic architecture must always contend with the heat, and the shape of the Museum of Central Australia and the Strehlow Research Centre presages the conflict. A big rammed-earth wall occludes the entry, like a battlement. It is an unusual building, with an even more unusual purpose. Only 500 copies were ever printed, in a custom font with special diacritical marks for Arrernte pronunciation. It was an incredible but charged piece of scholarship, and there were questions about whether it should even exist. It was a slightly sinister object that had attracted obsessives with bad intentions. 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 Songlines by Bruce Chatwin: 9780142422571

Over many years Strehlow filled reams of notebooks, took more than 26 kilometres of film, and was finally entrusted by the harried Arrernte lawmen with their most sacred rites. They also gave him their churinga– engraved stones and other totemic objects– with final instructions to destroy them. This act was almost equivalent to the men handing over their own souls. He did not destroy them, and instead used this gifting to declare himself an Arrernte lawman, one of high degree, and claimed ownership of the spiritual material through the authority of tribal law. Creating Songs of Central Australia might have been easier for Strehlow if he had been just a cynical thief. But conflict between custodianship and the desire to reveal gnawed at him. Near his death, he would say he regretted having anything to do with Aboriginal spiritual business. Bruce Chatwin was a highly regarded English writer and traveller with a deep curiosity about nomadic people. He was fascinated by the idea of songlines around the world that tell the story of the land, and he wrote this book as a fiction, but using his own name as the narrator. How much is first-hand experience, or researched or simply imagined, I have no idea. The idea of songlines is fascinating, that by learning a song you are learning a map that might be enough to show you the way half way across a continent. People who don't live in Australia think it is a smaller place than it actually is - it is actually as big as the USA without Alaska. That you could learn a song and that would be enough to guide you across such a distance seems utterly remarkable to me. Or so, at least, he claims. Chatwin's tendency to embellish the truth has perhaps been overstated, but this is obviously not meant to be taken as a textbook (and says so itself on more than one occasion). But it is, equally obviously, accurate to Chatwin's experience on the points that matter. In 1987 this flexible approach to veracity perhaps seemed more unfamiliar, but now The Songlines looks like a perfectly comfortable example of what's generally corralled under the vague genres of ‘life writing’ or ‘creative non-fiction’. Michael Liddle is an Alyawarre man with Arrernte links, and chairman of the Strehlow Research Centre Board. I ask him about Chatwin’s liberationist conception of songlines, and he is sceptical.Sometimes, I overheard my aunts discussing these blighted destinies; and Aunt Ruth would hug me, as if to forestall my following in their footsteps. Yet, from the way she lingered over such words as 'Xanadu' or 'Samarkand' or the 'wine-dark sea,' I think she also felt the trouble of the 'wanderer in her soul.” 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! Bradley, John; Yanyuwa Families (2010), Singing Saltwater Country: Journey to the Songlines of Carpentaria, Allen & Unwin, ISBN 978-1-74237-241-9