AustLit

'Bruce Chatwin's Songlines (1988) has become famous for the way in which Chatwin was able to communicate to a popular audience the richness of the Aboriginal song cycles or Dreaming tracks that criss-cross vast regions of Central Australia. Chatwin had read T.G.H. Strehlow's Songs of Central Australia (1971), greatly admiring the idiosyncratic nature of Strehlow's work. It was Strehlow's depth of scholarship combined with his comparison of Aranda song with other literary traditions across the globe that attracted Chatwin - and which also incensed the anthropological community.' (Publication abstract)