The Songlines: Bruce Chatwin

Product Information

Is it enough that indigenous peoples be represented by other people's politicians, public servants or lobbyists? Esta segunda parte es el punto débil del libro. No sólo porque la colección de ideas, citas, narraciones y opiniones es muy desperdigada. También es muy larga. Y es tal cantidad de información que el lector se ve obligado a olvidar una parte.

Songlines and stolen children: lessons from Indigenous Songlines and stolen children: lessons from Indigenous

Being in Brixton gives a special resonance: it will not feel like “working with the motherland”, she says. “So I get to avoid a little bit that colonial thing, if you know what I mean. I’m not going there to work with England so to speak – I’m going there to work with people I relate to and who have maybe experienced the same oppressive histories.”The song was supposed to lie over the ground in an unbroken chain of couplets: a couplet for each pair of the Ancestor's footfalls, each formed from the names he 'threw out' while walking." The idea of songlines is fascinating, that by learning a song you are learning a map that might be enough to show you the way half way across a continent. People who don't live in Australia think it is a smaller place than it actually is - it is actually as big as the USA without Alaska. That you could learn a song and that would be enough to guide you across such a distance seems utterly remarkable to me. The man who went 'Walkabout' was making a ritual journey. He trod in the footprints of his Ancestor. He sang the Ancestor's stanzas without changing a word or note - and so recreated the Creation." Chatwin, who died far too young soon after the book came out, wrote: “The melodic contour of the song describes the land over which the song passes ... certain phrases, certain combinations of musical notes, are thought to describe the actions of the ancestors’ feet. An expert song man … would count how many times he has crossed a river or scaled a ridge – and be able to calculate where, and how far along, the songline he was ... A musical phrase is a map reference. Music is a memory bank for finding one’s way about the world.” Anthropologist Robert Tonkinson described Mardu songlines in his 1978 monograph The Mardudjara Aborigines - Living The Dream In Australia's Desert.

The Songlines - Penguin Books UK

Neighbouring groups are connected because the song cycles criss-cross all over the continent. All Aboriginal groups traditionally share beliefs in the ancestors and related laws; people from different groups interacted with each other based on their obligations along the songlines. [5]Others were not so forgiving. A whiff of mild fantasy, combined with homophobia, and Chatwin’s denial that he had AIDS, have contributed to an aura of a tall-tale teller. He was one of the first prominent Britons to die from the disease, and latched on to exotic and speculative diagnoses, many fed to him by confused physicians. “My dear, it’s a very rare mushroom in the bone marrow which I got from eating a slice of raw Cantonese whale,” he wrote in one letter. He became an aficionado of his own illness, correctly guessing that it had originated in Africa. Now, you’ve got to love that: a song that can tell a story about the creation of the land you’re walking – or driving – over, or even the sea, and the people who’ve traversed it ahead of you, and bring you safely to a destination where you’ve never been before, without an atlas or Google Maps. All you’ve got to do is know the song.