The Songlines is ground-zero. Aboriginal culture has been taken out as an unintended consequence of the fictional jottings of a British travel writer in the late 1980s. The destruction was almost certainly unintentional. How could Chatwin know that a generation of cultural activists would like his casually penned version of Aboriginal culture better than the careful recordings of 200 years of ethnographers and anthropologists? Regrettably, he died shortly after the book was published so he never witnessed the damage or set the record straight. Chatwin's view of Aboriginal life was a few short weeks spent mostly in the culturally corrupt vicinity of Alice Springs. He was desperate to deliver another book, having abandoned a recent effort to write on the nomadic groups he already knew. He brought notebooks to Australia with his collected anecdotes and jottings of nomadic life elsewhere in the world. And he brought a yearning to wrap his life's experience roaming the World up into some grander theory of the importance of movement to human development. This hodgepodge of unresolved ideas became The Songlines. It's a good yarn - up to the point where he runs out of steam and decides to pad the book out with slabs of his collected notebook entries. Despite this, the book was successful, sold well and promoted an exotic (albeit fictional) view of the Australian Aboriginal and their cultural beliefs. The apparent realism of his writing readily transported his readers to a foreign land, a colourful adventure, and a compelling view of a stone age culture struggling for survival. Except that little of it was accurate. The complex cultural world of Aboriginal songs (ceremonial, informational and entertaining) was transmogrified into a wayfinding system. And now, due to the uncaring bowerbird eclecticism of art and museum custodians and post-modern cultural warriors, a mishmash of cultural junk is being carelessly pasted over the authentic core, like unsupervised children turning the Ark of the Covenant into a decoupage project. Given the effect that The Songlines has had on the contamination of Aboriginal culture, it is essential reading for those seeking a clearer understanding. Its casual travelogue of the degraded circumstances and dissolute behaviour of town dwelling Aborigines in the 1980s has some authenticity. But all pronouncements of the operation and detail of traditional Aboriginal culture should be considered fiction until tested against more reliable sources. It gets five stars because it's a good yarn with a collection of thought-provoking anecdotes on the nature of human development and because it's become essential reading to understand Aboriginal cultural politics.

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The Songlines (Penguin Classics)