THE SONGLINES - Bruce Chatwin

THE SONGLINES by Bruce Chatwin

Author: Bruce Chatwin was born in Sheffield in 1940. After visiting Marlborough School he worked as a porter at Sotheby's. Eight years later he was still working at Sotheby's, but now he had become one of the youngest directors. Between 1972 and 1975 he worked for the Sunday Times. Then he went to Patagonia for six months'. This trip inspired him to write "In Patagonia", which won the Hawthornden Prize and the E. M. Forster award and even launched his writing career.
One of his best-selling books was "The Songlines", which went straight to number one in the Sunday Times bestseller list and stayed in the top ten for nine months.
After 49 years, Bruce Chatwin died in January 1989.

Story: Bruce Chatwin is not only the author of this book but also one of the main characters. He always pursued his passion for world travelling and this book is about his journey in Australia.
Bruce meets Arkady, an Australian citizen (his parents came from Russia), who works together with Aboriginals trying to prevent the government from destroying their sacred places. Together they travel around Alice Springs. Bruce meets some Aboriginals, who give him heaps of information about Australian culture, the way Aboriginals used to trade, the Dreamtime (a time when their ancestors created everything and named it; the Aboriginals learnt this through an oral tradition of stories and songs), their languages (more than 200) and songlines. Bruce gets to know stories and songs for different places while travelling through the outback with Arkady and some Australian aborigines.
But he does not only learn about Australian culture, he also gets to know that racism against Aboriginals is in Australia a common thing. On their trip they have to wait for a tank of gasoline much longer, only because there are blacks in the car. In a hotel, where he wants to buy some drinks "coons" are not allowed.

Characters:

Aborigines: Some people would call the Australian Aborigines primitive and backward. But in this book their enormous warmth and their charming way how to deal with life in general under such terrible conditions is shown.

Arkady: He's one of the few Australian citizens who communicates with Aboriginals. That's why he works with the Aboriginals and the government to preserve the Aboriginal culture.

Bruce: He tries to find parallels for the culture of Aborigines in other areas of the world and other times. He compares them with the African nomads and the "ancestors" with Greek Gods.

Subject: Before colonisation the Australian continent was criss-crossed by thousands of Aboriginal tracks. They knew these tracks through songs. The songs identified geographical features of the landscape and sources of food and water. The songs originated from ancestors and were also known as the footprints of the Ancestors. The Songline also is the trade route, because songs, not things are the principal medium of exchange. Very fascinating is the fact that songs went leapfrogging through language barriers, regardless of tribe or frontier they start from the north-west, make their way through twenty languages and reach the sea near Adelaide. Other tribes would not understand the words but would recognise a song by its "taste" or "smell" the "tune".

Comment: Often Aborigines are characterised as standing on the way of progress. The Australian culture that has developed since 1788 has managed to pollute every river, to devastate Australian forests and to bring pollution and erosion to a land the aborigines call "mother" - can you call that progress?
On page 301 there is a statement which made me think a lot about white culture.
"We give our children guns and computer games", Wendy said, "They gave their children the land."
Looking at the way children are treated you can learn a lot about the culture itself. The statement shows that Aboriginals get to know their country already in their childhood and learn essential things like surviving techniques, while white children's games are destructive and pointless.
And now white people want the Aboriginals to adopt white culture, which, to me, seems to be the wrong way, because the Aboriginals already lived on this continent a long time before the first European settler arrived!