Singarayar, Suganthi --- "Book Review - Songlines" [1989] AboriginalLawB 12; (1989) 1(36) Aboriginal Law Bulletin 19

• Book Review-Songlines
• Obituary Bruce Chatwin

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Book Review -

Songlines

by Bruce Chatwin

Vintage 1989, 293 pp

Reviewed by Suganthi Singarayar

Bruce Chatwin came to Australia to find out more about Aboriginal Songlines - an idea that he has been interested in over a long period of time. In the process he wrote a book about Australia - the land, its people both black and white, and tried to answer what is for him "the question of questions: the nature of human restlessness".

A songline is an Aboriginal concept. In the dreamtime, each ancestor as they walked through the land, singing it into being, left behind them a dreaming track or songline. Every Aborigine "owns" a part of the dreaming track of their totemic ancestor and it is their duty to ensure that the song is remembered and sung, so that the country stays in existence. Using this song they can move across in safety and without losing their way. The languages along the line may change, but the melody remains the same, acting as a map and a guide.

The concept of Aboriginal songlines creates what amounts to a legal minefield. The Aboriginal idea of territory is not "a block of land hemmed in by frontiers: but rather ... an interlocking network of "lines" or "ways through." In Aboriginal belief they (Aborigines) are meant to be at one with the land, they cannot own it, or sell it, or possess it, they are keepers of the land, they are the land. To regain the "way through" or songline or sacred site on a songline today, they must own the land in the western sense of ownership of property. How can one own a line of land? How can one justify/comprehend the ownership of a block of land when it "belongs" to no-one and to everyone?

All of Australia when viewed from the standpoint of a songline is a sacred site. How does one sort out the western legal ramifications of such a concept? How does one reconcile two such different cultural concepts on the ownership of the land?

Bruce Chatwin also writes about the other people who inhabit the land the Aborigines live in. The whites who "own" the stations and pubs, the whites who work with and for the Aborigines and the whites who just happen to live in their land. Without intentionally doing so, Bruce Chatwin contrasts 40 000 years of Aboriginal culture with 200 years of white settlement. The attitudes of the outback whites to the Aborigines is often demeaning and degrading. There are a few who respect the Aboriginal people and culture; there are just as many who don't.

In the Northern Territory racism is a way of life, as it is elsewhere in Australia. An article on Roberta Sykes in the Good Weekend 17/9/88 said, "She believes Australia is still an appallingly racist country, and spins off story after story to prove it: the Pryor boy who suicided, the daily evidence uncovered by the Muirhead Inquiry. "In Townsville things haven't changed that much." After reading Songlines, the same can be said for Alice Springs and Katherine and...

Bruce Chatwin does not need to spin off story after story; the few he includes are not intended to shock, rather they illustrate his journey in Australia - the bottled "Authentic Northern Territory gin piss" at the Burnt Flat Hotel. The policemen at the hotel at Glenn Ormond who "knew" that Aborigines were different - they had different urinary tracts to the white man ...

The concept of Aborigines as different may account in part for the way they have been, and continue to be, treated. A white school teacher in Popanji said "there was an awesome power in these apparently passive people who would sit, watch, wait and manipulate the white man's guilt". A strange statement, but an almost universal reaction from the white man (or in fact any conquering people), about any culture they have seemingly "conquered", yet which has managed to elude their comprehension. The Africans, the Indians, and the Chinese all have seeming passivity that masks an almost supernatural force ("black!" magic?) that is used to manipulate the white man. The only difference between them being the colour of their skin - black, brown, and yellow. The weight of the white man's guilt in post-colonial times is almost as heavy as that of the white man's burden in colonial times. Is the white treatment of Aborigines a reaction to fear and guilt? Do those who live closest to Aborigines and their land feel like interlopers and therefore treat Aborigines as such?

Bruce Chatwin does not write about a stagnant culture somewhere in the past. Many of the Aborigines have a foot in both worlds and, like peoples everywhere, they have their own factions and infighting. They have survived for 40 000 years in a land many whites still find inhospitable after 200 years. Mr. Chatwin writes

of a culture that is here and now. Firmly set in the present - how firmly is brought home by the sound of a plane flying over Alice at the dead of night on its way to the American base at Pine Gap. The Aborigines of the red centre are much closer to the centre of the world stage than the average city dwellers with their television sets and their daily news bulletins. In this setting 'songlines' takes on a greater significance, they are part of a world where NASA, NATO and the Arms Race are more important than the rights and beliefs of many of the world's indigenous cultures.

Australia and her Aborigines only form a small backdrop to a greater, wider quest - the nature of restlessness. Bruce Chatwin takes us from Africa to Europe, from the beginning of time to the present, in his search for the answer. Eventually, Songlines becomes the story of his own search and journey over many years and through different lands and peoples. It leaves us with questions about our own beginnings and thinking about our own future on this planet. It also leaves us with a deep respect for humans everywhere.

Obituary
Bruce Chatwin

Bruce Chatwin died on January 17 1989 of a rare and debilitating bone marrow disease which he contracted during a trip to Western China in the early 1980s.

His wanderlust had taken him to remote corners of the world, including parts of the Australian outback, where he researched and gathered stories for his last novel, Songlines, which was published amongst international acclaim.