'Songlines' or 'Dreaming Tracks' are what all Europeans call the labyrinth of invisible pathways that meander all over Australia. To Aboriginals, they are the 'Footprints of the Ancestors'; they are both intricate sources of personal identity and territorial markers. From such ancient line, Bruce Chatwin has been able to trace a great deal about an Aboriginal culture as complex as it is different from our own. The conflict between the two ways of life mirrors that within 'civilised' man himself. Disputes over the right to ...
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'Songlines' or 'Dreaming Tracks' are what all Europeans call the labyrinth of invisible pathways that meander all over Australia. To Aboriginals, they are the 'Footprints of the Ancestors'; they are both intricate sources of personal identity and territorial markers. From such ancient line, Bruce Chatwin has been able to trace a great deal about an Aboriginal culture as complex as it is different from our own. The conflict between the two ways of life mirrors that within 'civilised' man himself. Disputes over the right to excavate land that is sacred to wandering tribes highlight the importance of myth and instinct in the human psyche. What might in other hands seem theatrically picaresque, Bruce Chatwin transforms into something approaching the scale of Greek tragedy...
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Add this copy of The Songlines to cart. $11.28, good condition, Sold by Aardvark Books Ltd rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Bucknell, HEREFORDSHIRE, UNITED KINGDOM, published 2003 by Vintage.
A fascinating trip into the esoteric world of the Australian aborigines....a people inextricably bound to the land and the mythologies that enables them to live in complete harmony with it.
On the surface, their way of thinking is difficult for the modern western mind to grasp, but once one melds into their ethos, one can begin to appreciate the innate wisdom contained therein.
This is not a book for the couch potato sitting in front of the television twenty-two hours each day. But for the seeker... the searcher for a new way to understand our earth and our connection to it, this book furnishes us a first-rate tour of one fascinating part of it.