southern Songlines

Songlines or dreaming tracks are paths across Australia which, according to traditional Aboriginal cosmology, mark the routes followed by the 'creator-beings' when the world was being made. These literal footpaths, which crisscross the continent and can span hundreds even thousands of miles, represent the footprints of the Ancestors.

Each path is said to have been sung into being by a dreamtime Ancestor. What is truly remarkable is that the paths continue to be preserved and memorialized through song. Songs, passed down from generation to generation, describe the topography of a trail and landmarks along the way. One need only sing the song to find one's way. 

Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines is ostensibly about these paths, but the book is swarming with ideas.In it Chatwin describes his travels in the Australian Outback as he seeks to unravel the mysteries of these ancient routes. For Chatwin the songlines are the lifeblood of the Aboriginal way of life, their navigational, trade and spiritual arteries. He uses the songlines as a metaphor for travel itself and the book is in the end a rambling ode to human's desire for movement.  

To some, the Songlines were like the Art of Memory in reverse. In France Yate's wonderful book, one learned how classical orators, from Cicero and earlier, would construct memory palaces; fastening sections of their speech on to imaginary architectural features and then, after working their way round every architrave and pillar, could memorize colossal lengths of speech. The features were known as loci or 'places'. But in Australia the loci were not a mental construction, but had existed for ever, as events of the Dreamtime.

Other friends were reminded of the Nazca 'lines', which are etched into the meringue-like surface of the central Peruvian Desert and are, indeed, some kind of totemic map...

...No. These were not comparison I was looking for. Not at this stage. I was beyond that.

Trade means friendship and co-operation; and for the Aboriginal the principal object of trade was song. Song, therefore, brought peace. Yet I felt the Songlines were not necessarily an Australian phenomenon, but universal: that they were the means by which man marked out his territory, and so organized his social life. All other successive systems were variants-or perversions-of this this original model.

(Chatwin, The Songlines)

Published in the mid-1980s at what I gather was an important moment in Australia's Land Rights Movement, the book was one of the many contributing factors that helped create the space for a national dialogue on Aboriginal rights. There are times when Chatwin's evident fascination with Aboriginal cultures strays into condescension and exoticism. However, the overall effect of the book is to universalize the nomadic impulse Chatwin argues is within each of us. Given Australians' own compulsive travel habits, it is unsurprising that the book resonated with so many here.  

It definitely resonated with me. There are sections of the book that are just a succession of quotes or excepted journal entries. The patchwork of impressions and thoughts on travel perfectly mirror my experience of being in an unfamiliar place when everything is new and the littlest observations are somehow charged with meaning.     

At one point in the book I was reminded of the story of the Arkansas Traveller. For the uninitiated, the song 'The Arkansas Traveller' (today outside of AR the best known lyrics to the melody being: "I'm bringing home a baby bumble bee..") is based on a story by a blundering Southern aristocrat. Colonel Sanford Faulkner, whose family at one time owned the largest number of slaves west of the Mississippi, occupies an iconic place in Arkansas' history. Faulkner was born to tremendous wealth and privilege and seems to have squandered it at every opportunity. Faulkner ran for several state offices throughout his lifetime but was never elected. He was, however, appointed president of the Chicot County branch of the Real Estate Bank of Arkansas. Established by the state's 1836 constitution, the bank mortgaged farm property (mostly in the Delta) and sold stock certificates and bonds. However, under Faulkner's tenure the bank began making questionable loans to stockholders and the general public. When the national economic crisis of 1837 hit, the bank failed and roughly $1 million of investor money was lost by Faulkner's branch. As a result, the Arkansas General Assembly amended the state constitution to prohibit the incorporation or establishment of banks in the state. Good one Faulkner.  

Colonel Faulkner was apparently a masterful storyteller. In 1839, canvassing across the state on another of his failed campaigns, Faulkner got himself lost in rural, frontier Arkansas and as it grew dark he approached a ramshackle log cabin. As he would tell it, he was greeted by a dimwitted squatter who gave evasive answers to all of his questions. Each time he would ask for directions back to Little Rock, the squatter-bumpkin would play another section of an unintelligible fiddle tune. In exasperation, Faulkner finally offered to play the second half or "turn" of the tune the man was on about. The bumpkin was overcome with happiness at the suggestion and agreed to give Faulkner directions home, but not before he played the second half of the song. This fiddle collaboration became known as 'The Arkansas Traveller.'

The story quickly became part of the state's folklore and like all good folklore many different versions, lyrics and remixes have since proliferated. In later versions the lost traveller was more often than not from out of state. Every version portrays a sophisticate/ urbanite who gets lost in the Arkansas wilds and comes across a poor, transient yokel. As the story spread it came to perpetuate a negative countrified reputation for Arkansas. In 1896, William H. Edmunds, in a kind of retrospective, health impact assessment titled “The Truth about Arkansas,” calculated that the Traveler image had cost the state “millions of dollars. This cost took into consideration the presumed economic progress that would have taken place in Arkansas without the burden of a negative reputation."  Before I moved to Arkansas my uncle gave me a copy of the children's book The Arkansaw Bear (1898), which was inspired by the Traveller. The book not only reflects the racism of the day but also depicts a fantastic caricature of southern life. 

In The Songlines Chatwin describes how transient groups have been maligned and otherized throughout history. Think the Roma, Irish Tinkers, the Jews. In 19th century popular culture the image of the Traveller provided a way for the U.S. emerging as a world power to dismiss the perception of its provincialism and project it onto its southern states. Similarly, it seems that as a result of Australia's penal colonization and all the attendent associations, the stereotypical qualities and characteristics of convicts were projected onto Aboriginals. It's important for the logic of the story that that the bumpkin is a squatter and not tied to the land. While the eponymous protagonist  is the urban/ out-of-state traveller, the title is ambiguous and as the image of the Arkansas Traveller evolved the name became associated with the state baseball team, a local Arkansas newspaper, a racehorse and the nickname for any number of people from Arkansas (including a young Bill Clinton during his early campaign days).

The story itself is a kind of songline: only by singing the song is the traveller able to navigate home. Below is one of the my favorite renderings of the song:

Oh once upon a time in Arkansas
An old man sat in his little cabin door,
And fiddled at a tune that he liked to hear,
A jolly old tune that he played by ear.

It was raining hard but the fiddler didn't care
He sawed away at the popular air,
Though his roof tree leaked like a water fall
That didn't seem to bother that man at all

A traveler was riding by that day,
And stopped to hear him a-practicing away
The cabin was afloat and his feet were wet,
But still the old man didn't seem to fret.

So the stranger said: "Now the way it seems to me,
You'd better mend your roof," said he.
But the old man said, as he played away:
"I couldn't mend it now, it's a rainy day."

The traveler replied: "That's all quite true,
But this, I think, is the thing for you to do;
Get busy on a day that is fair and bright,
Then pitch the old roof till it's good and tight."

But the old man kept on a-playing at his reel,
And tapped the ground with his leathery heel:
"Get along," said he, "for you give me a pain;
My cabin never leaks when it doesn't rain."

One interpretation of the song is that that the old man is a lazy fool. Chatwin quotes a stanza from the Chinese Book of Odes which might point to a more subversive interpretation. 

Useless to ask a wandering man

Advice on the construction of a house.

The work will never come to completetion.