Chatwin went to central Australia to find out how Aboriginal songlines work — the invisible tracks across the country laid down by ancestral beings, sung into being, where the melody carries the shape of the land so a man can navigate a thousand miles by singing his way along it and trade the verses with people who speak other languages. Half the book is him traveling with a Russian-Australian fixer named Arkady, meeting people who tell him some of it and pointedly don’t tell him the rest. The other half is his old notebooks, a lifetime of quotes and field notes arguing that humans are built to walk and go wrong when they settle. Read it knowing he shaped what he heard. Unreliable narrator much?
The Songlines