The good points are that Chatwin's considerable intellect and narrative capacities weave a story based on year's travel experience. The bad point is that he knew almost nothing about his subject and as such has written an Englishman's compassionate contemporary account of the colonies.

I live and work on a remote aboriginal community near the areas Chatwin visited. Traditional Aborignal law is an amazingly complex oral culture so rich in history and symbolism that I have profound doubts about any whitefella ever properly understanding it, let alone a visiting foreigner desperately looking for something.

This is a great book, but don't think by reading it you will get a terrifically accurate profile of what being an aborigine is, whatever that means. They are not, as Chatwin seems to deduce, another group of nomadic noble savages more fulfilled than the more sedentary post-agriculture communitites.


Much more than a travel book   March 27, 2000
 26 out of 27 found this review helpful

William James said that to "learn the secrets of any science, we go to expert specialists, even though they may be eccentric persons, and not to commonplace pupils." It seems, Bruce Chatwin used the same method to shed light on what for him was the question of questions: the nature of human restlessness.

The Songlines consists of the stories of the eccentric experts in the science of restlessness Chatwin met in Western Australia, and notebook entries ranging from Blaise Pascal's philosophical reflections to a meeting with Konrad Lorenz in Austria. Chatwin had originally intended to use these notebook entries for a book on nomads. He gave up the project but the entries reveal the man and his quest.

In a way, The Songlines is Chatwin's own songline: a track which tells of what he found on his wanderings, and what he considered worth singing.


English guy checks out native Australians   September 2, 2000
 22 out of 24 found this review helpful

Bruce, an English guy, heads into the Australian outback to check out aborigines, as part of his life-long interest in nomadic cultures. Part of the book is travel writing - the wacko Australian situations and characters he meets are fully described - part the history/psychology/philosophy of nomadic living and human aggression, and part a poetic description of Aboriginal culture.

The link between a human sedentary existance and human aggression has long been described; Bruce presents sedentary living as an unnatural state, and the nomadic lifestyle as cleaner, more beautiful and better. It's very convincing while you're reading it, and certainly deeply interesting. It's certainly a refreshing counterpoint to thinking about all those land-related wars and situations (Israel, for example), to all the nastiness of European colonization in America, Africa, and Australia, and it has a certain intuitive appeal - land belongs to everyone!

I'm not certain how accurate Bruce's description of Aboriginal culture is, but I don't think it really matters. This is not a carefully constructed sociological or anthropological analysis, but rather a lyrical, and fairly romantic, description of nomadic life and a way of thinking. Most importantly, I think, the message is: the ways the Aboriginies think and relate to the land are powerful and beautiful and so different to what we're used to that it's very difficult for Westerners to appreciate them immediately.

I strongly recommend this book, because it outlines a way of thinking about the human condition that is nice, and that lingers in your mind for a long time.


A desperate last shot at meaning by a fellow who cared   February 8, 2001
 19 out of 20 found this review helpful

To really understand this book, of course, you have to understand that Chatwin knew he was dying of AIDS when he wrote it. Hence, (I think) the notes (which have raised so many pros and cons and head-scratchings among reviewers) tacked on at the end. He, sadly, was sinking fast and needed something to round out the book. The book, then, is not so much about the aborigines (which, as one reviewer has noted, it would be better to check out an Anthropolgy text on) as it is about the ailing Chatwin.-But who was Chatwin? I think he was primarily a) an erudite hyper-aesthete (He started out working for museums); and b) an unflagging disciple of Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher whose most famous dictum was "Everything is fire." In other words, everything is in constant change. Everything is on the move. Everything is being consumed and reborn. Whether it looks that way or not. As the poet Delmore Schwartz put it, "Time is the school in which we learn, that Time is the fire in which we burn."-This is why,I think the aborigines grabbed hold of his imagination at the end of his life, "Aboriginals,in general, had the idea that all "goods" were potentialy malign and would work against their possessors unless they were forever in motion." And, like Heraclitus, he inveighs against the members of his own race, "The whites were forever changing the world to fit their doubtful vision of the future."-But what was Chatwin's vision of the future? What did he expect to find out there in his dying days?-I think he gives the answer on page 293, the penultimate page of the book, where he writes, "...the mystics believe the ideal man shall walk himself to a 'right death.' He who has arrived 'goes back.' In Aboriginal Australia, there are specific rules for 'going back' or, rather, for singing your way to where you belong: to your 'conception site', to the place where your tjuringa is stored. Only then can you become-or re-become-the Ancestor. The concept is quite similar to Heraclitus's mysterious dictum,'Mortals and immortals, alive in their death, dead in each other's life."---I'm not at all sure exactly what this passage means. But the basic idea, I think, is that you keep moving down your songline or metaphysical groove or whatever until you die where you belong and thus rebegin a ghostly cycle of reincarnation. Chatwin's tone in quoting the Aboriginal beliefs and Heraclitus give us no clue as to how much of this he actually believed...But we do know from his life that he was always walking, always searching up to the very end.-Reading the book with this knowledge lends to it (despite the jumble it is that caused my four star review) an almost heroic quality.-So read it and be inspired!