The Songlines: Bruce Chatwin

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The character Arkady refers to Australia as "the country of lost children". This was used as the title for Peter Pierce's 1999 book The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety. The staff were using the collection to map the songlines on Google Earth. It was painstaking, and Angeles showed me the results so far, careful not to reveal anything age-graded. The work was incomplete, but you could already see it was not, as Chatwin described, “a spaghetti of Iliads and Odysseys, writhing this way and that”. Why Songlines Are Important In Aboriginal Art". Japingka Aboriginal Art Gallery. 24 February 2015 . Retrieved 16 January 2020.

Songlines and stolen children: lessons from Indigenous Songlines and stolen children: lessons from Indigenous

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.Very simply, in my probably fractured understanding, the island itself is, or is topped, by a giant squid or octopus with tentacles running down to the sea. People belonged to each triangulated area between the tentacles, or as Europeans would say, each area belonged to someone. Lawlor, Robert (1991), Voices of the First Day: Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime, Inner Traditions/Bear, ISBN 978-0-89281-355-1

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

but this text remains valuable for the unique perspective Chatwin takes of the world and its nomads. Chatwin is marvellously travelled, and he cites with brilliant ease his experiences in Niger, Timbuktu, Mauritania, Iran, and, of course, Australia. importantly he takes on an empathic view and not an Orientalist one. so we are delivered an understanding of the various nomadic cultures of the world - instead of tiresome judgments - and a much deepened understanding of the cultures and beliefs of the various Aboriginal peoples of Australia. one understands why Polo's voyage writings were so popular in their day: short of being able to travel oneself, vicarious travel is an excellent road to understanding. Chatwin describes his ultimate objective, "the question of questions" as "the nature of human restlessness".I’d had reasonable exposure to Indigenous peoples and their cultures before this voyage. But I’d never properly tried to understand or to explain exactly what a songline was. My aim was to be able to do both. In The Irish Times, Julie Parsons, after consideration of the difficulties encountered by Chatwin—"born, raised and educated in the European tradition"—in apprehending the nature of the relationship between the Aborigines and the land on which they live, notes that as the reader follows his narrative, they "realise the impossibility of Chatwin's project. The written word cannot express this world", but the book is read nevertheless "with pleasure and fascination. We read it to learn how little we know." [4]

Songlines | Common Ground Songlines | Common Ground

A unique facet of songlines lies in their role as cultural passports, denoting respect and recognition for specific regions and their inhabitants when the songs are sung in the appropriate languages. This intricate network of songlines interconnects neighboring groups, fostering social interactions based on shared beliefs and obligations. The perpetuation of songlines through generations sustains a spiritual connection to the land, underscoring the concept of "connection to country," wherein the intricate relationship between individuals and their ancestral lands forms a cornerstone of Aboriginal identity and cultural preservation. I’m not sure if it tells us the essentials of human nature. But it tells me that Aboriginal people were very intelligent, articulate and strategic thinkers… There’s a huge complex structure around songlines. And their belonging. It’s not just a word. It has a living presence. And there’s a law that governs that purpose.” Do you by any chance,” I asked in the old secondhand bookstore, “have any books about Aboriginal ceremonial song?” Perhaps somewhere else that question would have sounded innocent, but not in Alice, and the woman looked at me for a long time before saying, “What, for 59 cents?” She had a hard, ironic tone, and a bandage on her arm, and right away we could both stop pretending. We were talking about TGH Strehlow’s Songs of Central Australia. 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”. This is a book that is a personal response to whatever it is for white people to think about nomadic peoples with layers of meanings. It seemed to me to be a very honest book - the person telling the story does not try to make himself seem better than he is.A memorial service was held in the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Sophia in West London. It happened to be the same day that a fatwa was announced on Salman Rushdie, a close friend of Chatwin's who attended the service. Paul Theroux, a one-time friend who also attended the service, later commented on it and Chatwin in a piece for Granta. The novelist Martin Amis described the memorial service in the essay "Salman Rushdie," included in his anthology Visiting Mrs. Nabokov. Songlines trace astronomy and geographical elements from ancient stories, and describe how these things have helped shape the landscape as it is now. They were first used by First Nations people as a form of communication across the continent and a way of mapping Country.