@article{Nicholls_2019, title={A Wild Roguery: Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines Reconsidered}, url={https://czasopisma.uni.lodz.pl/textmatters/article/view/5875}, DOI={10.18778/2083-2931.09.02}, abstractNote={<p>This article revisits, analyzes and critiques Bruce Chatwin’s 1987 bestseller, <em>The Songlines</em>, more than three decades after its publication. In <em>Songlines</em>, the book primarily responsible for his posthumous celebrity, Chatwin set out to explore the essence of Central and Western Desert Aboriginal Australians’ philosophical beliefs. For many readers globally, <em>Songlines </em>is regarded as a—if not the—definitive entry into the epistemological basis, religion, cosmology and lifeways of classical Western and Central Desert Aboriginal people. It is argued that Chatwin’s fuzzy, ill-defined use of the word-concept “songlines” has had the effect of generating more heat than light. Chatwin’s failure to recognize the economic imperative underpinning Australian desert people’s walking praxis is problematic: his own treks through foreign lands were underpropped by socioeconomic privilege. Chatwin’s ethnocentric <em>idée fixe </em>regarding the primacy of “walking” and “nomadism,” central to his <em>Songlines </em>thématique, well and truly preceded his visits to Central Australia. Walking, proclaimed Chatwin, is an elemental part of “Man’s” innate nature. It is argued that this unwavering, preconceived, essentialist belief was a self-serving construal justifying Chatwin’s own “nomadic” adventures of identity. Is it thus reasonable to regard Chatwin as a “rogue author,” an unreliable narrator? And if so, does this matter? Of greatest concern is the book’s continuing majority acceptance as a measured, accurate account of Aboriginal belief systems. With respect to Aboriginal desert people and the barely disguised individuals depicted in <em>Songlines</em>, is Chatwin’s book a “rogue text,” constituting an act of epistemic violence, consistent with Spivak’s usage of that term?</p>}, number={9}, journal={Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture}, author={Nicholls, Christine}, year={2019}, month={Nov.}, pages={22–49} }