Chatwin based The Songlines (1987) on a journey he took with Salman Rushdie into the Australian outback after the two authors had met at a literary festival in Adelaide. In "Imaginary Homelands" Rushdie recalls that bouncing along in a pickup truck with Chatwin as they drove through central Australia was a revelation. Rushdie was both amazed and almost driven to silence by Chatwin's garrulousness. Chatwin seemed to have something to say about everything and to know everyone. He would pick up the phone and say to someone on the other end "Bruce here" and expect, in a land pretty thick with Bruces, to be recognized. To the locals, Chatwin was a "pom." A corruption of pomegranate--this bit of Australian slang was applied to British visitors with "exotic" upper-class accents and manners.
Australia was equally exotic to Chatwin. In The Songlines he recollects that as a boy he "never heard the word `Australia' without calling to mind the fumes of the eucalpytus enhaler and an incessant red country populated by sheep." He also remembers that his great-aunt Ruth had a picture book about Australia. His favorite picture "showed an Aboriginal family on the move. They were lean, angular people and they went about naked. . . . The man had a long forked beard and carried a spear or two and a spear thrower. The woman carried a dilly-bag and a baby at her breasts. A small boy strolled beside her--I identified myself with him."
For more than a decade Chatwin had been trying to write his "big book" on nomadism. In the Australian Aborigines he had found a subject that fit his theories about nomadism as the original condition of human kind. The Aboriginal practice of "singing" the land into being through verses that marked off clan boundary lines (the Songlines of the title) also appealed to him. As Arkady Volchok (possibly based on Rushdie) explains, "A song was both map and direction-finder. Providing you knew the song, you could always find your way across country." The idea of nomadic Aborigines "singing the world into existence" could not fail to appeal to a writer who recreated worlds with words.
The work that Chatwin produced from his trip to Australia may have captured the essence of the Aboriginal songlines, but it failed to capture the hearts of Australians who saw themselves depicted as living in a country that was "weirder than America" and possibly more racist. This paper will examine how Chatwin uses both fresh insights keen and hackneyed stereotypes to "sing" into existence "his" Australia.
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