Reading: Journeying in Travel Writing

When we announced 12 years ago that we’d be moving to Australia, our friends in New York threw us a big going-away party. Among the gifts were several books. Because we like to scuba dive, a fellow diver gave my husband a book all about diving in Victoria (somehow missing the fact that we were moving to Queensland, home to the world’s premier dive destination). Another friend, who is also a seasoned traveller, gave me a book called Culture Shock Australia: A Guide to Customs and Etiquette; and yet another, a struggling writer with a poetic outlook, gave me Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines. I tucked these into my carry-on luggage to read as we hop-scotched our way across the continental US and the vast Pacific Ocean, stopping in several places along the way to say goodbye to family.

Too excited to focus on anything deep or involved, I shoved The Songlines deep into the bag and browsed through Culture Shock Australia. I learned that folks in Australia don’t speak English but ‘Strine’. I learned that one must never over-dress or appear too organised, lest one be taken for ‘a tall poppy’. I learned that the meat pie was the national dish and beer the national drink. Consequently, nothing prepared me for the perfectly comprehensible, stylishly dressed population dining on sashimi, succulent Moreton Bay Bugs, and crabmeat lasagne served with a series of fabulous wines.

It was much later that I settled down enough to read The Songlines. I read this book as a non-fiction account of Chatwin’s journey through outback Australia. I wasn’t alone. Many have read the book under the same misconception. In fact, I’ve often seen it placed in the ‘Sociology’ section in bookstores. I’ve read reviews in which it’s proclaimed to be a great work of ethnographic interest. And a quick scan on Google shows it frequently listed as ‘non-fiction’. Like others, when I learned it was a fictionalised account of a brief trip (undertaken interestingly with Chatwin’s chum, Salmon Rushdie), I was crushed and a little angry.

The Songlines challenges traditional notions of genre, melding demarcations between ethnographic and fictional discourses. Long after its publication, Chatwin claimed that when asked he would always represent it as a novel. The problem is that it is a novel dressed up as a travel diary, and many people never thought to ask if it was anything else.

On the other hand, Chatwin’s defenders have referred to The Songlines variously as a postmodern masterpiece, as a fictionalised travelogue and—my favourite—as ‘autobiografiction’. Although it’s hotly disputed, Chatwin manages to capture the connection that Indigenous Australians maintain with the land. His image of ‘singing the world into existence’ is a beautiful one and, as a metaphor, right on the mark. Such an idea could not fail to appeal to a writer intent on re-creating the world with his own words. . . .

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