Looking for Chatwin, and His Songlines

Across Australia, countless unnamed paths cross and interlace, forming a labyrinthine network. Europeans call them songlines. Aboriginal people call them the footprints of the ancestors.

According to Aboriginal creation stories, in the Dreamtime totemic ancestors wandered across the vast land of Australia and sang every living thing into being. In those mysterious ancient songs, an animist world slowly took form. Aboriginal people have walked this desert for 55,000 years, generation after generation, from birth to death, departing from the ancestors and walking back towards them.

These were the things Arkady, Bruce Chatwin’s companion and guide in Australia, told him. Chatwin’s The Songlines has long been disputed by anthropologists, yet it fatally attracted me. I wanted to go and see, to walk a little of Australia’s songlines.

Bruce Chatwin was born in Britain in 1940. One of Sotheby’s youngest directors, later a writer for The Sunday Times, he resigned and produced several works of travel literature and photography before his death in 1989. A Moleskine obsessive, he bought every notebook of the brand he could find before leaving for Australia. The long notebook extracts in The Songlines are one of the book’s signatures. Chatwin believed that through travel and notes he had always been looking for an answer: what is the nature of human restlessness?

Chatwin was close to the German director Werner Herzog. When Herzog was filming Where the Green Ants Dream, Chatwin told him that he had once driven with Aboriginal companions who sang at high speed in the car, ten times faster than normal, because the car moved faster than walking and the rhythm of the song had to keep pace with the places they passed.

Before he died, Chatwin gave Herzog the leather rucksack he had carried on his travels: “You are the one who must wear it now. You are the one who must keep walking.”

Clive

I met Clive in Shanghai. He was speaking effortlessly about Aboriginal dot painting from Australia’s Northern Territory. In conversation, I noticed that he called Chatwin “Bruce”.

Clive’s ancestors were Irish and English; his father’s generation emigrated to Australia. His father knew he was an immigrant and told Clive to learn the local culture, believing that only by understanding Aboriginal culture could one truly know the land and live there for long. Clive went, and lived among Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory for more than thirty years. He learnt Aboriginal languages and now runs a gallery in Uluru selling Indigenous art: thirty per cent to him, seventy per cent to the artists, so they can buy food.

“My ancestors came from a small island in Ireland,” he said. “A few years ago they found an intact village site there, one of the oldest in Europe. People lived there five thousand years ago. They are my true ancestors. But archaeologists cannot piece together the story. They do not know why the village disappeared. Objects remained, but there was no story to give them life. I found nothing. My homesickness had nowhere to go. When I returned to Aboriginal country, I envied them even more. The question ‘Where do you come from?’ does not exist for them in the way it does for me.”

What makes Australia so compelling may be that it is full of immigrants who are, in truth, rootless. Homesickness carried Clive into Aboriginal country; the strong bond between people and land kept him there for three decades.

Trust was not easy. When Clive first moved into an Aboriginal community, he was a young documentary filmmaker. One day an elder came to his hut and said, “I want you to make a film. A princess film. You come with me.” The elder took him to film his daughter, a young woman in her twenties with a new baby.

Afterwards the elder said, “Do not show this film to anyone unless I give permission.” Clive agreed. A few days later, another old man demanded to see it, saying he was the young woman’s uncle. Clive refused, so the man accused him of stealing their image and their princess. Clive took him to the elder, who said lightly, “Of course he can see it. He is the princess’s uncle.”

Days later, five elders came together and told Clive: “You have earned our trust. You have proved that you keep your promises.” That trust has lasted until now.

“When you first walk into the desert,” Clive told me, “you suddenly have a lot of time to think, and a lot of time to feel uncomfortable.” It took him a long while to adapt. The wet season, hated by tourists and the season that once trapped Bruce there, is loved by Aboriginal people. The desert can reach 42 degrees Celsius, yet they are used to it. “Why not come then,” Clive suggested, “and see how humans survive in such heat?”

“How much of what Chatwin wrote in The Songlines is true?” I asked.

“Ha. When Bruce came, I was still a young fellow,” Clive said, remembering. “I would say ninety per cent is true. The mystical stories are true too. I have seen them myself, and that is why I believe this land has power. Bruce’s fiction lay in changing everyone’s names and genders: woman A became man B, man B became woman C, and woman C became woman A.” He laughed. “I knew most of the people in the book. After it was published it came back here, and I translated it for Aboriginal people. They identified everyone and laughed until they bent over.”

Alice Springs

Like Chatwin, I began in Alice Springs. Nothing here seemed particularly charming. Chatwin wrote of straight streets roasting in the sun, men in white socks getting in and out of Toyota four-wheel drives. Here he met Arkady, his guide.

Hotels in the Northern Territory serve breakfast early. To avoid fainting in the heat, I drank two cups of coffee that tasted like medicine and walked into the sun.

Across from the hotel was the dry bed of the Todd River, and Aboriginal shelters stood nearby. A group of women slowly crossed the riverbed. Later, a young Aboriginal man walked alone through low shrubs. He moved so slowly that I spent a long time watching him disappear.

It is said that Aboriginal people believe a person has a limited amount of life energy; when it is used up, life ends. So they often move slowly, or do nothing. Local white people, when explaining Aboriginal culture, usually add: we respect and understand it. In truth, the phrase often carries disdain.

Clive was away in Adelaide with Aboriginal artists when I arrived, so I asked him by phone about local taboos. Was it true that in the Northern Territory one must not pick up stones? They were beautiful.

“Picking up stones can indeed bring bad luck, but it depends where you pick them up,” he said. Hearing something odd in his laugh, I pressed him.

“Honestly, modern people are far more superstitious than Aboriginal people. It is ignorance. If you move a stone at a sacred site, yes, you are in serious trouble. But tourists sometimes pick one up beside a hotel path. That is not going to change your fate. We often receive stones mailed back from all over the world by tourists who say the stones brought them bad luck and apologise for ignoring the warning. Aboriginal people find this hilarious. But the excessive warning has one benefit: if a tourist really did move a sacred stone, that would be a very serious matter.”

My guide in Alice Springs was Bob, fifty-four, of Arrernte and white ancestry. His home lay between Alice Springs and Darwin. “I do not know the ancestral songs,” he said frankly. “In our time, we were taken away from family very young to learn in modern society. From eight to twenty-eight, I lived a modern life detached from my people.”

“I am grateful, in a way. It lifted me out of poverty and gave me more choices.” He meant modern choices. His ancestors did not choose to pass the songs to him. “My uncle knew some songs and stories, but he never passed them on. Perhaps he did, I do not know.”

Bob may not know the Dreamtime songs, but he knows the land and bush plants intimately. After years working in restaurants, he now runs an Indigenous food and culture tour. In the desert he pointed out water sources, plants and animals. At day’s end we stood on a rise, and he indicated a gap in the MacDonnell Ranges. “That is an ancestral footprint,” he said. “A sacred place for the Arrernte.”

The gap was Simpsons Gap, one of the Northern Territory’s must-see attractions. Bob lit a fire for dinner, and I wrote these notes in the short desert dusk.

Kings Canyon

For Aboriginal people, roads are songlines, and every ceremony is part of the songline. They wear modern cast-off clothes, share national parks with tourists, paint dot paintings on canvas and hunt with rifles. These changes are surface changes. They still hold fast to ceremony, songlines and eternity.

Once the car left Alice Springs, the phone signal vanished. Until the tower at Kings Canyon Resort, there was no contact with the outside world. The roadhouse looked unremarkable, facing an Aboriginal community across the highway, as if the road itself marked a border. In fact, nothing was so simple.

Ian, the owner, was also of mixed descent. Unlike Bob, he kept away from visitors and left everything to white thrill-seekers or Japanese workers completing visa requirements.

“Can we talk about songlines?” I finally caught him under a shelter.

“What do you want to know?” he asked, shrewd and direct.

“What exactly are songlines to you? Are the mysterious ceremonies in books true?”

“The books are all fake. Writers and anthropologists who claim to understand songlines are liars,” Ian said. “Songlines are ceremony itself. We still walk songlines, but walking them is top secret, the most solemn ceremony. A few years ago we held one, complete, unchanged. These things are not easily seen. It is not that the ceremony is invisible, you understand what I mean.”

“Can you tell me any details?” The heat made me impatient.

“Today, Aboriginal people still choose the most suitable person in a family to inherit the secrets and songs. If no one is found, then it ends. Of course ancient wisdom is in danger of extinction. Which people does not face that? But once such wisdom is spoken aloud, it changes shape. Do you understand? To change shape is destruction. Everything must remain as it was in the beginning.” He glanced at me. “What else can I tell you? Perhaps something. But then I would have to kill you.” He suddenly laughed. “Men and women have different responsibilities. I only know the men’s songlines.”

We fell silent. In the desert, getting through a day seems to require all one’s strength. I imagined Chatwin drunk at the bar and tried not to think of the coffee and double brandy in his book. I returned to my signal-less room and reread The Songlines through the long night.

I was no longer obsessed with knowing what songlines “meant”.

The next day I found a biography of T. G. H. Strehlow in the hiking station. Chatwin had also found it in a desert bookshop and dismissed it at first as a wretched book: badly written, rambling and unbelievably long. Strehlow was born in 1908 to missionary parents in the Northern Territory. He grew up speaking fluent Arrernte and became the first, and perhaps only, white man regarded by Arrernte people as one of their own.

For thirty years he recorded rapidly disappearing songs and ceremonies with paper, pen, tape and film at the request of Aboriginal friends who feared the songs would vanish with them. By the end of 1933 he had travelled 4,828 kilometres, collected more than thirty myths and thousands of sacred songs. The Strehlow Research Centre in Alice Springs now holds sacred objects, film, song recordings and photographs.

Late in life Strehlow became increasingly consumed by a grand idea: that Aboriginal songs corresponded closely with Hebrew, Ancient Greek, Old Norse and Old English. He wanted to dig through the relation between song and land to find a solution to the human condition. It was impossible. Critics accused him of stealing songs from trusting elders for publication. In 1978, he died at his desk, having given everything to the Dreaming.

Chatwin read Strehlow all night and concluded that he was a unique thinker whose work was great and lonely. I turned the pages of The Songlines again and again. For the sake of that great loneliness, perhaps I could go a little further, a little closer to the nature of songlines.

Uluru

From the air, Uluru, Mount Conner and Kata Tjuta form a vast alignment of stone. Aboriginal people believe these powerful rocks mark the road walked by ancestors in the Dreamtime. Mystics say something similar, calling the line an energy line of the earth.

Uluru and Kata Tjuta are now within a national park, shared by Anangu people and tourists. Before the Northern Territory’s heat rises in the morning, tourists rush to photograph the place. After sunset, visitors must leave this sacred ground.

Clive and I met in the afternoon and drove along the red dirt roads into an Anangu community. A sign at the entrance said permits required.

“Do we have a permit?” I asked.

“My face is the permit,” Clive said. “If you came alone, even with a permit, I would not recommend going in. Not that it is especially dangerous, but no one would talk to you.”

Gloria, one of the elders, knew herbal medicine and women’s ancient knowledge. She was already sitting in the shade, silent, flies circling her without effect. Clive greeted her warmly in an Aboriginal language. She nodded at me expressionlessly and spoke. “Yesterday another baby was born in our family,” Clive translated. “The whole family has been holding a smoking ceremony.”

I had accepted that the ceremony itself could not be described, so I asked only how long it took.

“In the past, our ancestors had no concept of time. I do not know how long yesterday’s ceremony took. A very long time.” Gloria’s slow speech confirmed a different sense of time. Soon she went beneath a tree to prepare herbs. “The smoke drives away flies,” Clive explained.

“Spend enough time with them and you realise their sense of time and space is nothing like ours. Especially when travelling together. They point to two hills and say: look, those two sisters are travelling together. My God, that is a story from the Dreamtime, from creation, yet they speak as if pointing to two acquaintances.”

Through Gloria’s explanation and Clive’s translation, I finally understood that every inch of land our wheels crossed was part of a songline. Driving along ancient songlines felt strange. Long ago, Aboriginal people walked and sang the names of places they passed; the world came into being that way. But songlines are not merely creation stories. They are a vast religious system. In a modern world obsessed with change, Aboriginal people use songlines to keep everything within the Dreamtime, and so within eternity.

Later I joined a tourist dot-painting workshop where visitors could invent symbols to tell a story. Modern people are ruled by time; everyone kept asking how long a dot painting takes. Staff answered. The Aboriginal painter went on dotting, unconcerned.

“What does the dot itself represent?” I asked Clive.

“What do you think?”

“Energy?”

He smiled and said nothing.

To Aboriginal people, almost everything we now see is ceremony: dot painting, hunting kangaroo with fire, everything.

At dusk, Clive drove me around Uluru in pursuit of the setting sun. We bounced over red dirt roads while recordings of Aboriginal stories played in the car, a slow gentle female voice recounting creation myths. I could barely see the changing light on the rock. Between the slow narration and the rapidly shifting light, a dark opening formed, drawing one into a real Dreamtime.

“Uluru is warm all year, even on the shaded side,” Clive said. “Aboriginal people take this as proof that it holds great energy. There are many caves in the rock. One famous cave has been developed for tourists, but Anangu people still hold rain-making ceremonies there after visitors leave.

“You have to look like an Anangu person to see its secret: lower your head and go into the cave, see the thousand-year-old rock paintings, then walk out and turn back at the road. Only then can you clearly recognise that the rock itself looks like a coiled serpent.

“Further in is a waterhole that never dries. Sometimes after ceremony, rainclouds really do come and pour over the pool.”

Clive loves playing guitar. Whenever he can, he plays and sings local Aboriginal songs in the desert. Northern Territory dusk is brief. I thought of an Indigenous saying from Mexico: dusk is the gap between worlds.

In the last light, I read the ending of The Songlines again. Mystics believe a perfect person should walk on their own legs towards a good end; those who reach it have gone home. Aboriginal people have many rules for going home, or singing oneself into belonging: return to the place that conceived you, return to where the spirit-child is stored, and only then merge with the ancestors.

I closed the book and slept. I dreamt of huge beings flashing blue light and small humans in a hunting scene. Perhaps it belonged to the creation time of some people. Perhaps it belonged to my own remote past.

Even as eras change, there is still a moment when the earth enters you, teaches compromise and surrender without language, and finally grants you a luminous Dreaming.