Community And Community In The Songlines By Bruce Chatwin

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Hope Erickson

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Dr. Hoyer

15 October 2015

Community is a group of people who are viewed as a whole due to their common values, attitudes, and goals. The common threads differ from community to community, but are crucial to the understanding of unity. In The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin, the indigenous people of Australia, or Aboriginals, find community through common spiritual beliefs. Aboriginals believe that totemic beings had once wandered the land singing what that came upon, which brought the earth into existence. This common belief of creation ties the Aboriginals together. In Exodus community is found through core beliefs, that bring people together even in today’s world. The most well known of these core beliefs

Community is always evolving, and ties the past, present, and future together.

Communities have affect not only the present time, but the future as well. In Exodus, Moses receives the ten commandments from God. “And God spoke all these words: ‘I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery’” (Exodus 20:1). God then proceeds to list the ten commandments that should be followed. This creates an instant community in the most simple of ways; by tying a group of people together through similar beliefs. The commandments are also a way of God showing his promise to the Israelites. Rather than using symbols like in Genesis, God uses the commandments to attempt to communicate his commitment to the entire nation. They are values that a community of people can easily recognize and share. The commandments are not only to give guidelines on how they should behave, but also a way for people to denote their commitment to God. Even when the Israelites disobey the ten commandments to worship a golden calf, they do it together, as a community. Upon finding this out, Moses breaks the tablets with God’s

Their community created by songlines and totems persisted far enough into the future for Chatwin to be able to experience it first hand on his quest to learn more about them. His journey allowed him to become part of the community to some extent, by learning more about their attitudes, values, and goals much of which through Arkady. Arkady is a Russian born Australian citizen, who earned the trust of the Aboriginals so much so that they approved of him learning their songs. Chatwin’s new knowledge of the Aboriginal culture included knowledge of their cherished totems, and their want for the land to remain untouched. Due to past generations influence, the current generation of Aboriginals believed it was wrong for a railroad to be constructed. They wanted to preserve their sacred sites. This belief brought them together once again as a community, and deemed Arkady’s job “to identify the 'traditional landowners '; to drive them over their old hunting grounds, even if these now belonged to a cattle company; and to get them to reveal which rock or soak or ghost-gum was the work of a Dreamtime hero” (Chatwin, p.