AustLit

'Stephen Muecke’s No Road (bitumen all the way) is an ambitious work that blends travel, ethnography and cultural theory. Using the Aboriginal nexus between space, story and wandering (an area Bruce Chatwin explored in The Songlines), Muecke heads into the vast area of north-western Australia to document a personal journey, with no particular destination. He writes about this region and its Aboriginal communities without resorting to representing both landscape and people as a picturesque other (Chatwin’s weakness, according to Muecke, is his European, imperial aesthetic sense): “Communities lie on the tracks and byways of experience (the No Road of his title), not on the national highways of myth and ideology (the bitumen).” Muecke, in the tradition of Deleuze, conceives of writing as an endless journey, always keeping ideas…' (Introduction)