To lose a passport

was the least of one’s

worries: to lose a
notebook was a
catastrophe.
(The Songlines)

Bruce Chatwin (1940-1989)

Bruce Chatwin.
Bruce Chatwin

1. Life

• Born in Sheffield in 1940.

• Spent much of the War in a

nomadic drift from one lodging to
another.

• At the age of four, he went to stay

with his great aunts Janie and
Gracie at Stratford-upon-Avon. Bruce Chatwin

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Bruce Chatwin

1. Life

• Aunt Gracie read him poetry from an

anthology called The Open Road,
through which he discovered “the
strident, beckoning music of Walt
Whitman”.

• Aunt Janie, who was a reader of

modern fiction, introduced Bruce to
Hemingway, his acknowledged Bruce Chatwin

mentor in prose style.

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Bruce Chatwin

1. Life
• Attended Marlborough College and
developed a passion for antiques,
becoming a precocious collector.

• At fifteen acquired a copy of a classic

travel book, The Road to Oxiana
(1937) by Robert Byron, which he raised
to the status of a sacred text.

• In December 1958 started to work at the

London fine art auctioneers, Sotheby
and Co. of Bond Street.
Bruce Chatwin

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Bruce Chatwin

1. Life
• In 1973 was offered a job as a
freelance contributor to “The Sunday
Times Magazine”.

• Announced his departure with a

telegram: “Gone to Patagonia for six
months”.

• This trip was to result two years later

in a travel book, In Patagonia (1978).
Bruce Chatwin

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Bruce Chatwin

1. Life
• Four other books followed.
The Viceroy of Ouidah, 1980
On The Black Hill, 1982
The Songlines, 1987
Utz, 1988
What Am I Doing Here, 1989

• Was diagnosed as HIV positive, died

on 18 January 1989.

• Anatomy of Restlessness published

Bruce Chatwin posthumous in 1996.

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Bruce Chatwin

2. In Patagonia (1978)
• 97 sections.

• Invisible narrator.

• Description of the land, its

history and people.

• Concise statements of
Patagonia
location and time.

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Bruce Chatwin

2. In Patagonia (1978)
• Descriptions appealing to
all senses.

• Quotations from outside the

text to provide authority
and to offer differing
perspectives and draw a
connection between what
he writes and the Patagonia

experience that he praises.

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Bruce Chatwin

3. In Patagonia: themes
• The journey.

• The fascination with pre-historic cultures and exile.

• Nomadism and human restlessness.

• The community of Welsh exiles who led solitary and

eccentric lives at the margins of society  the symbol of
the freedom of man to be what he chooses to be.

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Bruce Chatwin

4. The Songlines (1987)

My reason for coming
to Australia was to try
to learn for myself,
and not from other
men’s books, what a
Songline was – and
how it worked.
Ayer’s Rock (Uluru), Australia
(The Songlines)

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Bruce Chatwin

4. The Songlines (1987)

The songlines are a labyrinth of
invisible pathways which stretch to
every corner of Australia. Aboriginal
creation myths tell of the legendary
totemic ancestors – part animal, part
man – who create themselves and
then set out on immense journeys
across the continent, singing the
name of everything that crosses their
path and so singing the world into ABORIGENS
existence. Australian Aboriginal

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Bruce Chatwin

5. The structure of the book

Two parts

Bruce’s and Arkady’s From the Notebooks:

journey following the presents quotations that
songlines influenced Chatwin and
longer descriptions of
his encounters with
anonymous desert
wanderers and famous
thinkers.

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Bruce Chatwin

6. The Songlines (1987)

BRUCE  THE NARRATOR

Arkady Volchok  a 33-year-old Russian-Australian with a

double function in the book:

1) A mouthpiece for the thoughts of Chatwin himself.

2) Bruce’s guide into the mysteries of the songlines.

“The Aboriginals [..] were a people who trod lightly over the earth;
and the less they took from the earth, the less they had to give in
return [...] The wars of the twentieth century are the price for having
taken too much”
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Bruce Chatwin

6. The Songlines (1987)

DREAMTIME  Part of
aboriginal culture which
explains the origins and culture
of the land and its people.
Dreamtime is Aboriginal
Religion and Culture.

Cover for the first edition of The Songlines.

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Bruce Chatwin

6. The Songlines (1987)

CREATION  Everything in the
natural world is a symbolic
footprint of the metaphysical
beings whose actions created our
world. As with a seed, the power
of an earthly location is wedded to
the memory of its origin.
“Ancestor Spirits” came to Earth
in human and other forms and the
land, the plants and animals were
given their form as we know them
Cover for the first edition of The Songlines.
today.
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Bruce Chatwin

6. The Songlines (1987)

Once their work was done, the
Ancestor Spirits changed again;
into animals or stars or hills or
other objects. For Indigenous
Australians, the past is still alive
and vital today and will remain so
into the future. The Ancestor
Spirits and their powers have not
gone, they are present in the
forms into which they changed at
the end of the “Dreamtime” or
“Dreaming”, as the stories tell. Cover for the first edition of The Songlines.

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Bruce Chatwin

7. The Songlines: themes

• The journey.

• Nomadic life.

• Criticism of western materialism.

• The rights of the aboriginals.

Ayer’s Rock (Uluru), Australia

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