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Darrin Baker

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Songlines and Fault Lines: Epic Walks of the Red Centre

by Glenn Morrison (Goodreads Author)

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Darrin Baker said: " Songlines and Fault lines is an intriguing and challenging work for a number of reasons. Morrison sets out - like one would at the beginning of a long walk - with a plan, a map, and some strategies for the path ahead. The book is also obliquely circu Songlines and Fault lines is an intriguing and challenging work for a number of reasons. Morrison sets out - like one would at the beginning of a long walk - with a plan, a map, and some strategies for the path ahead. The book is also obliquely circular by design, its origins speaking of cultural practices and rituals of Aboriginal clans of central and South Australian mainland. It ends with a call for deeper and more considered engagement with those cultures, whilst recognising the need for respect and a need to speak from a deep place within ourselves in order to build stronger bridges across the cultural divide.

The six chapters touch on distinct phases of engagement since the colonisation and appropriation (most often by force) of Aboriginal land. The ideas that sit beneath each chapter are significant, but the narratives themselves are constructed as one does with a walk: one step at a time, one foot in front of the other. On these walks - and via Morrison's flinty and accessible prose - we are taken through lands and ideas unfamiliar to many. Long and difficult paths set amongst stunning beauty, but country that also conceals, and threatens those who either disrespect it, or fail to gauge its immense power.

We travel alongside Aboriginal storytellers, early white explorers, well-intentioned missionaries and romantic conservationists, not to mention the formidable intellect of Bruce Chatwin, and others. In each journey Morrison attempts to engage by locating us time and again in the prevailing discourses. Themes like the power of Empire, the romantic view of the noble savage, the politics of assimilation, and the subsequent backlash and rejection of colonial practices and policies all feature.

Each walk sets out to wrestle with these distinct, yet overlapping themes. The previous review of this book on this website seems conflicted, or unsettled by the author's attempts to place well recognised cultural and philosophical ideas in front of a popular audience, and why that is so seems a mystery to me. There's little doubt that Britain didn't just bring rabbits and plough horses to Australia. They brought the might of the British Empire, its writers and its ideas and its own determination to impose them, and within that contested world we live, now, as much as then.

There's a need for works such as this in our current literary environment, and why I think that comes down largely to the lack of rancour in its pages. Morrison's quest doesn't seem to involve taking prisoners; rather he wishes to point to the ways certain approaches and mindsets in the complex world of Aboriginal and Anglo relations have led us to be prisoners of our own ways of thinking. ...more "

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— Oct 13, 2018 08:58PM

Oct 13, 2018 08:53PM · see review