Why do we wander?
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Why do men wander rather than sit still?
— Bruce Chatwin
This question gripped Bruce Chatwin his whole life.
He first met a nomad during a trip to Sudan in 1965 and became fascinated with their way of life. Later, during his studies in archeology at Edinburgh, he started writing a treatise on the nomadic side of human nature (this after getting tired of his art dealing career at Sotheby’s). He never finished his paper (or his degree), seemingly too restless himself, but his entire literary legacy can be read as an attempt to understand what he saw as the innate human need to travel.
In that spirit, Chatwin spent several weeks in 1983 and 1984 in Australia learning about Aboriginals and their culture. Out of these travels came the extraordinary book, Songlines (1987), about which Chatwin said, “To call it fiction isn't strictly true, but to call it nonfiction is an absolute lie.”
Chatwin was drawn to Australia to understand what are known as ‘songlines’, or ‘dreaming tracks’. He hoped these invisible paths crisscrossing Australia might stand as a metaphor for all of humanity’s wanderlust, which he thought was genetic. In Chatwin’s words:
Aboriginal Creation myths tell of the legendary totemic beings who had wandered over the continent in the Dreamtime, singing out the name of everything that crossed their path — birds, animals, plants, rocks, waterholes — and so singing the world into existence… Each totemic ancestor, while travelling through the country, was thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the line of his footprints… these Dreaming-tracks lay over the land as ‘ways’ of communication between the most far-flung tribes… In theory, at least, the whole of Australia could be read as a musical score.
The Aboriginal peoples’ songs are simultaneously the oral tradition of their respective mythoi and histories (these vary between groups), and maps of the land itself. The ‘songlines’ are paths across the landscape that were created by ancestral beings during the Dreaming (or Dreamtime), the sacred period of creation. By walking along a path and singing its song, the Aboriginal peoples’ music brings to life the landscape through which the ancestral being travelled. Each note, each word, is tied to a specific location on the songline. Land and music are one.
A skilled Aboriginal navigator can traverse thousands of miles by singing these songs in sequence, using them to locate landmarks and water sources. One of the most remarkable examples is a 3,500-kilometre songline connecting the Central Desert region to Byron Bay. Covering such long distances means songlines often cross different language groups’ territories, creating a network of shared cultural knowledge. The melodic contour of songs transcends language barriers, as the rhythm itself conveys the nature of the land, making songlines act as a kind of ‘cultural passport’ when crossing different territories. It also means some of the songs take hours and hours to sing in full, yet are preserved entirely via the oral tradition.
In aboriginal belief, an unsung land is a dead land: since, if the songs are forgotten, the land itself will die.