The Songlines - Hardcover

Chatwin, Bruce

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224024523 ISBN 13: 9780224024525

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 1987

Synopsis

'Songlines' or 'Dreaming Tracks' are what all Europeans call the labyrinth of invisible pathways that meander all over Australia. To Aboriginals, they are the 'Footprints of the Ancestors'; they are both intricate sources of personal identity and territorial markers. From such ancient line, Bruce Chatwin has been able to trace a great deal about an Aboriginal culture as complex as it is different from our own. The conflict between the two ways of life mirrors that within 'civilised' man himself. Disputes over the right to excavate land that is sacred to wandering tribes highlight the importance of myth and instinct in the human psyche. What might in other hands seem theatrically picaresque, Bruce Chatwin transforms into something approaching the scale of Greek tragedy...

About this title

Review

The late Bruce Chatwin carved out a literary career as unique as any writer's in this century: his books included In Patagonia, a fabulist travel narrative, The Viceroy of Ouidah, a mock-historical tale of a Brazilian slave-trader in 19th century Africa, and The Songlines, his beautiful, elegiac, comic account of following the invisible pathways traced by the Australian aborigines. Chatwin was nothing if not erudite, and the vast, eclectic body of literature that underlies this tale of trekking across the outback gives it a resonance found in few other recent travel books. A poignancy, as well, since Chatwin's untimely death made The Songlines one of his last books.

Review

'Extraordinary...a remarkable and satisfying book' Observer

Edition details

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape
• Publication date: 1987
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0224024523
• ISBN 13: 9780224024525
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 293