The Songlines
In my novel The Dreaming, Joanna Drury arrives in Australia 1871 on a quest to solve a mystery that has haunted her all her life. During this quest, while experiencing adventure, danger and romance, Joanna discovers that, in order to get to the bottom of the mystery that plagues her - or she will never know true happiness - she must follow something called Songlines, the invisible pathways along which Australian Aborigines have traveled for thousands of years to perform their sacred and cultural rites.
Readers have asked me where they can find further information about these enchanting and mysterious tracks that criss-cross the Australian continent, and I always recommend The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin (Penguin Books, New York), one of the many references I used while doing research for The Dreaming. A blend of travel, history, science and spirituality, this astonishing book perfectly captures Chatwin's own metamorphosis as he undertakes a personal "walkabout" - a journey over Australia's parched wastelands. Along the way he meets fortune hunters and rednecks, racists and Aboriginal holy men, as he ponders the source and meaning of nomadism, the origins of human violence and the emergence of mankind amid arid conditions. And in the end he discovers man's wondrous place in the universe.
Here is an excerpt: "Each totemic ancestor, while traveling through the country, was thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the line of his footprints …. The whole of Australia could be read as a musical score. There was hardly a rock or creek in the country that could not, or had not been sung." A song or songline, Chatwin explains, was both map and direction-finder, as well as a way of communication between far-flung tribes
Like Joanna, my heroine who found the Songline that led her to the solution of a mystery and to the question of her own origins, Chatwin also found himself spiritually transformed by the Songlines. This is a poetic and epic memoir from which no one walks away unchanged.
Image Source: www.ceo.wa.edu.au
