The Songlines
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| Author | Bruce Chatwin |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Vintage Classics |
| Released | 1982 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 304 |
| ISBN | 0099769913 |
The Songlines is a 1987 book written by Bruce Chatwin, combining fiction and non-fiction. The book develops Chatwin's thesis that the songs of the Aborigines are a cross between a creation myth, an atlas and an Aboriginal man's personal story. While the book's first half chronicles the main character's travels through Outback Australia and his various encounters, the second half is dedicated to his musings on the nature of man as nomad and city builder. The junction between the book's halves is challenging for the reader, not unlike Chatwin's descriptions of Land Cruisers navigating the Outback roads. But the reward for ploughing on is substantial. In the second half Chatwin puts his phenomenal knowledge and experience on display in the service of an overarching theory of mankind.
The basic idea that Chatwin posits is that language started as song, and the aboriginal dreamtime sings the land into existence. A key concept of aboriginal culture is that the aboriginals and the land are one. By singing the land, the land itself exists; you see the tree, the rock, the path, the land. What are we if not defined by our environment? And in one of the harshest environments on Earth one of our oldest civilizations became literally as one with the country. This central concept then branches out from Aboriginal culture, as Chatwin combines evidence gained there with preconceived ideas on the early evolution of man, and argues that on the African Savannah we were a migratory species, hunted by a dominant brute predator in the form of a big cat: hence the spreading of 'songlines' across the globe, eventually reaching Australia (Chatwin notes their trajectory generally moves from north-east to south-west) where they are now preserved in the world's oldest living culture.
Sometimes defined as a travelogue, the text has been criticised for being masculinist, colonialist, simplistic and therefore unreliable as both a source on European Australians and Aboriginal culture. Other critics have praised it, and Chatwin in the book is vehemently opposed to the image of the inferiority of the Aboriginals; others also see the author as a proponent of postmodern writing, challenging traditional forms of linear narrative.
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