Star traveller: celebrity, Aboriginality and Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines (1987)

Abstract

Within the international field of contemporary Anglophone travel writing Bruce Chatwin looms large as a celebrity traveller and writer. This paper tracks Chatwin's celebrity through various fields, examining his most enduring and controversial book The Songlines (1987) to analyse how its representation of Aboriginality contributes to the mythologization of the author. The essay makes two claims. The first is that the discourses through which Songlines values Aboriginality coincide with those employed to represent its narrator and author, and consequently contribute to the celebrity persona of ‘Bruce Chatwin’. Moreover, the representation of Aboriginality and celebrity in Songlines is compatible with a discourse within contemporary consumer culture that putatively eschews consumerism and gestures nostalgically to romantic notions of self and other even as it exploits the exotic manifestations of Aboriginality as cultural commodity. The second and related claim is that Chatwin's celebrity performs a specific function within the context of the postcolonial field of cultural production. Chatwin's celebrity functions to resolve the dissonance created by competing regimes of value through which Aboriginality as a symbolic commodity is defined. In this regard, Chatwin, as celebrity traveller, performs a role akin to that Pierre Bourdieu ascribes to cultural intermediaries. As such, Chatwin does not necessarily provide non-Aboriginal readers with ‘knowledge’ about Aboriginal culture; rather, his public persona provides his readers with an example of how to manage the conflicting values attributed to Aboriginality within national and transnational postcolonial public spheres.