Vol. 9 No. 13 · 9 July 1987
pages 3-5 | 2642 words
Writeabout
John Bayley
- The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin
Cape, 293 pp, £10.95, June 1987, ISBN 0 224 02452 3
The well-known speech in Dryden’s play Aurungzebe beginning, ‘When I consider life, ’tis all a cheat,’ has the emperor gloomily observing that we still expect from the last dregs of life ‘what the first sprightly running could not give’. The empress, however, takes a different line: keeping going is what matters.
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
This article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
- print this article
Letters
Vol. 9 No. 15 · 3 September 1987
From Tim Armstrong
SIR: Reading John Bayley’s review of Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines (LRB, 9 July), I was amazed to see the following two sentences: ‘As birds and animals have no objection to squalid surroundings, the modern Aboriginal lives in a mess of plastic bags, rusty cars, candy-bar wrappings, which presumably become part of his Songlines. His wish to keep or to revive the old ways seems to be mainly a way of getting at the Government, inhibiting land development and upping the welfare cheque.’ The charitable response was that Professor Bayley had momentarily gone, as they say in Sydney, ‘off the air’. But in an article which pretends to take some notice of European attitudes to ‘primitive’ peoples, there is no excuse for a comment which is (need it be spelt out?) casually racist, condescending, and seemingly more indicative of a reading of The Tempest than any experience of Aboriginals. In fact, the reviewer maintains this breezily prejudiced tone throughout. He opens by likening the Aboriginals to tinkers and gypsies, dismisses those showing an interest in native ideas about land as misty-eyed ‘nuts’, and then suggests that returning some lands to Aboriginal use is equivalent to Apartheid (plainly, it isn’t). Chatwin’s account of Australia is praised for the delicacy with which it exposes the distance between Nomadic realities and Western stereotypes. Professor Bayley might do well to show some of the same delicacy, and an understanding of the reality of exploitation and resistance, rather than characterising the Aboriginals as animals, dole-bludgers, discards and impediments to ‘development’. As it is, he displays nothing so much as what he himself calls ‘the disillusion of the sedentary’. Rightabout that.
Tim Armstrong
London E3
John Bayley writes: I am sorry I seemed to Tim Armstrong to be condescending about Aboriginals, about whom I only know what I read in Bruce Chatwin’s remarkable book. I gave what seemed to me his own views on the matter, which are certainly neither sentimental nor condescending. The point about Apartheid was made by an Australian teacher in an Aboriginal community, in conversation with Bruce Chatwin.
