Sluggish and sedentary peoples, such as the Ancient Egyptians – with their concept of an afterlife journey through the Field of Reeds – project on to the next world the journeys they failed to make in this one.” In 1987, Herzog made Cobra Verde, a film based on Chatwin's 1980 novel The Viceroy of Ouidah, depicting the life of Francisco Manoel da Silva, a fictional Brazilian slave trader working in West Africa. Locations for the film included Brazil, Colombia and Ghana. He did not much test his nomad theory on the “nomads” themselves, though. Pat Dodson (appearing as Father Flynn) got a taste of it, but the traditional men he encountered are shy and distant presences in the book. For Sawenko and others, this is The Songlines’ central failure: Chatwin had neither the time nor the inclination to approach Aboriginal philosophy through Aboriginal people, and instead relied on white intermediaries. The area where the philosophy seems most distorted is where it touches on obligation. Songlines anchor those who sing them in place, in family, and in kin. They are a source of constraint and rootedness, not just a siren song to go walkabout. But Chatwin was not looking for another wellspring of duty. He might also have discovered that his redemptive theory was not what it seemed. La historia de la mutación de Licaón en lobo me hizo remontar a un ventoso día de primavera en Arcadia cuando había visto, sobre el mismo casquete de piedra caliza del monte Licaón, una imagen del rey fiera agazapado. Leí la historia de Jacinto y Adonis; de Deucalión y el Diluvio; y de cómo «las cosas vivientes» fueron creadas a partir del tibio fango nilótico. Y, en razón de lo que ahora sabía acerca de los Trazos de la Canción, se me ocurrió pensar que tal vez toda la mitología clásica representaba los vestigios de un gigantesco «mapa de canciones»: que todas las idas y venidas de los dioses y las diosas, las cuevas y los manantiales sagrados, las esfinges y las quimeras, y todos los hombres y mujeres que se transformaron en ruiseñores o cuervos, en ecos o narcisos, en piedras o estrellas… todos ellos se podrían interpretar en términos de una geografía totémica.”

Bruce Chatwin’s song Thirty years on, what should we make of Bruce Chatwin’s song

Later works included a novel based on the slave trade, The Viceroy of Ouidah, which he researched with extended stays in Benin, West Africa. For The Songlines (1987), a work combining fiction and non-fiction, Chatwin went to Australia. He studied the culture to express how the songs of the Aborigines are a cross between a creation myth, an atlas and an Aboriginal man's personal story. He also related the travelling expressed in T he Songlines to his own travels and the long nomadic past of humans. This is a book that is a personal response to whatever it is for white people to think about nomadic peoples with layers of meanings. It seemed to me to be a very honest book - the person telling the story does not try to make himself seem better than he is. Margo Neale is feeling proud. “Here we are,” she says, “250 years after the British set out to colonise and civilise us, taking our culture to the British – to teach them how to survive in this fragmenting world.” Neale, an Indigenous Australian from the Gumbaynggirr and Kulin nations, is just warming up. “It is our civilisation,” she continues defiantly, “that had the resilience to survive over millennia: the ice age, sea rises, drought, invasion, violence, all sorts of oppression and pandemics. So, this is us showing Britain we have the knowledge to survive – knowledge held in the songlines.” Coleridge once jotted in a notebook, 'The Prince of Darkness is a Gentleman.' What is so beguiling about a specialist predator is the idea of an intimacy with the Beast! For if, originally, there was one particular Beast, would we not want to fascinate him as he fascinated us? Would we not want to charm him, as the angels charmed the lions in Daniel's cell?”Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the 'walks' of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence.”

The Songlines - Penguin Books UK

Others were not so forgiving. A whiff of mild fantasy, combined with homophobia, and Chatwin’s denial that he had AIDS, have contributed to an aura of a tall-tale teller. He was one of the first prominent Britons to die from the disease, and latched on to exotic and speculative diagnoses, many fed to him by confused physicians. “My dear, it’s a very rare mushroom in the bone marrow which I got from eating a slice of raw Cantonese whale,” he wrote in one letter. He became an aficionado of his own illness, correctly guessing that it had originated in Africa. It’s a practical thing for me. It’s in the little closet next to my mosquito net and my canteen. Just the essential things that I would need.Songlines trace astronomy and geographical elements from ancient stories, and describe how these things have helped shape the landscape as it is now. They were first used by First Nations people as a form of communication across the continent and a way of mapping Country. Chatwin enrolled at the University of Edinburgh to study archaeology in October, 1966. Despite winning the Wardrop Prize for the best first year's work, he found the rigour of academic archaeology tiresome. He spent only two years there and left without taking a degree.