The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin

White men, he began, made the common mistake of assuming that, because the Aboriginals were wanderers, they could have no system of land tenure.  This was nonsense.  Aboriginals, it was true, could not imagine territory as a block of land hemmed in by frontiers: but rather as an interlocking network of 'lines' or 'ways through'.

'All our words for "country"', he said, 'are the same as the words for "line".'

For this there was one simple explanation.  Most of Outback Australia was arid scrub or desert where rainfall was always patchy and where one year of plenty might be followed by seven years of lean.  To move in such a landscape was survival: to stay in one place suicide.  The definition of a man's 'own country' was 'the place in which I do not have to ask.'  Yet to feel 'at home' in that country depended on being able to leave it.

The Songlines is Bruce Chatwin's account of his experiences studying the songlines of Outback Australia, the central facet of Aboriginal Australian religion.  To the best of my understand, the songlines, which criss-cross the entirety of the Australian continent, are lines that mark the travels of the Dreamtime Ancestors, the first progenitors of the creatures that still live in Australia: Emu Ancestor, Lizard Ancestor, Kangaroo Ancestor, even down to caterpillars and worms.  Each Aboriginal belongs to one of these ancestors' clans--not based on his parentage but, amazingly, the songline where his or her mother stands when she first feels the baby kick!--and an Aboriginal on "walkabout" is tracing the route of his original ancestor, often for hundreds and hundreds of miles.  He's guided by a song which recounts the ancestor's story as it describes the land; the song is the line and the line is the song.

The songlines are sacred and at least quasi-secret; Chatwin encounters a great deal of resistance and suspicion from the people he interviews.  Consider the tjuringa, a wooden board that bears a representation of a person's ancestral songline, an object so sacred and secret it's considered the person's very soul.  To lose or break them is world-ending; outsiders are forbidden to even see them, though that hasn't stopped the British Museum from displaying them, as one person points out.  Chatwin is pretty dismissive of claims that he's poking his nose in where it doesn't belong, most of which come not from the Aboriginals themselves but from white advocates.  He's assisted by a Russian-Australian named Arkady, whose job is to help Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory navigate the legal threats to their songlines.  As you can imagine, when the landscape is an invisible map of sacred paths, railroads and development can be existential threats.  Many white Territorians Chatwin encounters seem to regard the Aboriginals as enemies of progress, and he records a fair amount of pointed and discomfiting racism.

Chatwin tells people that he has come to Australia because he's writing a book about nomadic cultures across the world.  It seems at first that Chatwin gave that project up to write The Songlines, but it dawned on me about halfway through the book that this book is that book.  A monsoon strands him at a remote Outback post, where he turns to his notebooks, and suddenly the book becomes not a narrative of his experience in Australia--or not just that--but also a collection of vignettes from Chatwin's experiences with nomadic cultures in Africa and Asia, as well as interviews with archeologists and researchers, and even passages culled from other authors.  Chatwin's thesis is that human beings are nomadic by nature, and that war and aggression are the hallmark of sedentary societies.  Civilization, in the form of the house, the city, the immobile community--is a mistake.  (He even goes so far as to identify a particular ancient carnivorous cat, Dinofelis, as the ancient threat that caused our ancestors to be nomadic, and argues that war and violence are a sublimation of our struggles with this cat.)

In Australia, Chatwin finds an emblematic nomadic society, threatened and transformed by the forces of civilization.  The songlines, he theorizes, can even be seen as paths radiating from the desert of Africa where humans were born.  These grand theories, while compelling, make me suspicious about whether Chatwin is able to see Aboriginal religion and culture clearly, or if his desire to present a Grand Theory of Nomadism has colored his account of them.  (I was also wearied by his apparent incapability of describing a woman without detailing the size, shape, and movement of her breasts.  What's with that?)  But Chatwin's commonplace book-like account of his travels throughout the world give him a credibility when it comes to his belief in the value of wandering, and he has a knack for presenting a vision of the world in the form of human stories.