Quotes from book
The Songlines

Name: The Songlines
Author: Bruce Chatwin

The Songlines is a 1987 book written by Bruce Chatwin, combining fiction and non-fiction. Chatwin describes a trip to Australia which he has taken for the express purpose of researching Aboriginal song and its connections to nomadic travel. Discussions with Australians, many of them Indigenous Australians, yield insights into Outback culture, Aboriginal culture and religion, and the Aboriginal land rights movement.

“As a general rule of biology, migratory species are less 'aggressive' than sedentary ones.

There is one obvious reason why this should be so. The migration itself, like the pilgrimage, is the hard journey: a 'leveller' on which the 'fit' survive and stragglers fall by the wayside.

The journey thus pre-empts the need for hierarchies and shows of dominance. The 'dictators' of the animal kingdom are those who live in an ambience of plenty. The anarchists, as always, are the 'gentlemen of the road'.”

Bruce Chatwin book The Songlines

Source: The Songlines

“To lose a passport was the least of one's worries. To lose a notebook was a catastrophe.”

Bruce Chatwin book The Songlines

The Songlines (Penguin, 1987, ISBN 0140094296, p. 160

“Even today, when an Aboriginal mother notices the first stirrings of speech in her child, she lets it handle the "things" of that particular country: leaves, fruit, insects and so forth. "We give our children guns and computer games," Wendy said. "They gave their children the land."”

Bruce Chatwin book The Songlines

The Songlines (Penguin, 1987, ISBN 0140094296, p. 270