The Songlines: Bruce Chatwin

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Our stories and songlines provide us with a charter for life,” says Angeles. “They encapsulate the whole spectrum of human emotion and human nature. Our elders are remarkable people– their capacity to hold, cherish and transmit deep cultural knowledge is absolutely astounding. The men who worked with TGH Strehlow were men who retained these original stories of this continent, and they held thousands of verses in their heads and hearts that can now be transmitted to the younger generation of Arrernte men– their descendants.” he argues that Songlines are a universal concept that transcends different peoples, cultures and times.

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Songlines are often passed down in families, passing on important knowledge and cultural values. [3] At its core, a songline functions as both a navigational aid and a repository of cultural knowledge. Embedded within traditional song cycles, dance rituals, stories, and artistic expressions, these pathways enable individuals to traverse vast distances while reciting the songs that describe landmarks, water sources, and natural features. Notably, the melodic contours and rhythmic nuances of the songs transcend linguistic barriers, facilitating cross-cultural understanding as different language groups interact and share the essence of these ancient narratives.I wasn't expecting the primary narrative to be almost a diary of 'what Chatwin did' while in Western Australia. A catalogue of his interactions, observations, conversations and thoughts, but that is exactly what is was. How much of it is true, in context, and without omissions we will never know, but I found it a very easy read, largely very amusing, and reasonably legitimate sounding when it came to the Aboriginal information. It couldn't have been less academic; the style was casual. 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... Chatwin describes his ultimate objective, "the question of questions" as "the nature of human restlessness". A stop marked where a man had got to the end of his own country, and a neighbour's country had started. The song was supposed to lie over the ground in an unbroken chain of couplets: a couplet for each pair of the Ancestor's footfalls, each formed from the names he 'threw out' while walking."

Bruce Chatwin: letters from a fallen angel | London Evening Bruce Chatwin: letters from a fallen angel | London Evening

Relationships to country: Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islander people (PDF) (Report). Res005 [Indigenous Perspectives]. Queensland Studies Authority. March 2008 . Retrieved 9 July 2021. La “mappa” di Ipolera Herman Malbunka, l’ultimo erede del Gatto Selvatico e dell’Uccello dello Spinifex, custode del loro Sogno, del mito fondatore della storia della sua gente - nelle sue terre. There was another anniversary in Alice, being marked rather than celebrated. Thirty years since The Songlines. Ten years since the start of the Northern Territory Emergency Response, better known as The Intervention. The Intervention was only supposed to last five years, but like most government management of Indigenous populations, it suffered mission creep. Reports of endemic child abuse claims had sent the army into remote communities. The reports had been overblown, and every metric of Aboriginal welfare had declined since, but the policy retained bipartisan support. You could hear the word “Intervention” for many years without recognising it had been borrowed from the “tough-love” school of dealing with addicts.Chatwin contemplates on the human race, reflecting on where we came from and where we're headed. Can you summarize his thinking? What are your thoughts? Esta segunda parte es el punto débil del libro. No sólo porque la colección de ideas, citas, narraciones y opiniones es muy desperdigada. También es muy larga. Y es tal cantidad de información que el lector se ve obligado a olvidar una parte. Scaling these intellectual monuments, even tracing their outlines, is almost impossible. Songlines are not just sung poems. They are also legal documents, genealogical records, maps and the legends of maps, documentations of flora and fauna, systems of navigation, religious rites, spells, history books, memory palaces, and endless other combinations of ceremony, knowledge and philosophy that cannot be readily analogised into another culture. Anthropologists have dedicated their lives to obtaining only the most peripheral glimpses of them. Some have resisted further insights, knowing they are bought through a system of law, obligation and initiation that is not entered into lightly. Compared to the accumulation and expanse of millennia of living traditions, writing itself can seem like an almost futile explanatory tool. And Chatwin had only a few weeks. Cairns, Hugh; Yidumduma Bill Harney (2003), Dark Sparklers: Yidumduma's Wardaman Aboriginal Astronomy: Night Skies Northern Australia, H.C. Cairns, ISBN 978-0-9750908-0-0 The Yolngu people of Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory tell the story [12] of Barnumbirr, a creator-being associated with the planet Venus, who came from the island of Baralku in the East, guiding the first humans to Australia, and then flew across the land from East to West, naming and creating the animals, plants, and natural features of the land.