As much as we tell ourselves that we are rational beings living in the scientific era, our lives are shaped by myths. Large and small, obvious and subtle, they ripple across society, influencing the significance with which we view everything from the oceans that give us life to the stars that give us dreams. They provide us a narrative along which we can trace our heritage, connecting us in an unbroken line back to humans who walked the earth millennia ago. They even bring their formidable powers to bear upon the ways in which we conceive of the future and the paths we will follow as individuals and as societies. Consequently, studying these myths can tell us a great deal about ourselves and our destinies. After all, we authored them. We fostered them. We empower them. Mr. Chatwin takes up one of humanity's most enduring mythologies in this timeless piece of travel journalism.
Cut off from the rest of the world for nearly 40,000 years, the aboriginal people of Australia are an anthropologist's dream. Deprived of any external, cultural contaminations, they possessed, until the arrival of Europeans, a pure strain of belief that stretches back 400 centuries to their landing on these strange, rocky shores. Carefully cultivated by the countless generations, the Dreaming conceives of the world as having been named into existence by the songs of giants, distant ancestors who left buried in their paeans and their deeds the knowledge of the world and the many creatures who inhabit it. This spiritualistic naturalism not only kept the aborigines alive for 1,600 generations in a less-than-hospitable land, it engendered in them a fundamental respect for their environment as deeply at odds with our modern, extractive world as their naturalism must have been to the white puritans who invaded their shores 250 years ago.
In 1988, Mr. Chatwin, originally from England but a wanderer at heart, travelled to Australia to chronicle the Dreaming. Beginning his journey in Adelaide, he and his Australian guide embedded themselves in some of the world's remotest communities, viewing through a humanist's eyes the practices of a people so unlike us as to seem anachronistic, as if time cruelly displaced them from the proper course of events. He chronicles the aboriginal concept of community, of Payback, of songlines. But more than this, he communicates the remoteness and the sameness of a place and a people that might have continued to be as they were had adventurers not interrupted their isolation. For this is a people almost congenitally opposed to change, a people so deeply rooted in who they are and their idea of the world that to endorse change would be to violate the Dreaming and the songs that give the world life. Imaginative and lyrical, Songlines is first-rate non-fiction. Mr. Chatwin, who tragically died a year after his journey into Australia's distant past, is, here, not only linguistically clever and attitudinally charming, he evinces a breadth of knowledge and a depth of inquisitiveness that is both endearing and engrossing. For this is more than just a book about a culture as fascinating as it has been mistreated by the white man. It is an adventure into the nature of modern man, into the ideas that give his life meaning, into the science of his evolutionary history, and into his compulsions to explore, to wander, to investigate, to learn. In this, Songlines is as much a rumination on the essence of life as it is a rumination on the Dreaming which is fortunate given that both pursuits have much in common.
Mr. Chatwin is reluctant to speak directly to the degree to which aboriginal culture has been degraded by the arrival of westerners, but he does allow the anecdotes transcribed here to strongly suggest his admiration for a people whose place in our modern world is less than certain. For our cultural frameworks stand in such stark opposition to one another that it's hard to imagine finding any common ground. Mr. Chatwin's description of aboriginal belief seems almost anti-modern. For to create the world we enjoy, one needs industry, the exploitive nature of which is antithetical to their way of life. However, this position also serves to highlight the shortcomings in our own extractive system. For our civilization only operates so long as it can be materially fed. Once those resources run dry, once the land as been exhausted, the machine grinds to a halt and then where are we? Far worse off than the aborigine's, certainly. Mr. Chatwin has the kind of mind that cannot but be a pleasure to see sprawled out on paper. For in its meanderings and musings is a kind of expansive wisdom that goes some way to bridging the gap between such disparate cultural outlooks. As winning a piece on the nature of man as it is on the aboriginal world... (4/5 Stars)
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