Travel, Indigeneity, Ecocriticism, and the Sacred in Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines and Julia Martin’s A Millimetre of Dust

Abstract

Julia Martin’s A Millimetre of Dust: Visiting Ancestral Sites (Cape Town: Kwela, 2008) and Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines (London: Picador/Pan Books, 1987) celebrate the worldviews of indigenous South African and Australian people respectively. Indigenous understandings of the world turn on kinship with nature rather than control of nature, and are spiritual rather than material. Martin’s travelogue refuses to privilege humans over animals, and Chatwin’s text illustrates the inseparability of the sacred and the profane in the lives of Aboriginals. Both authors present readers with mysteries: the imagined presence of vanished Khoisan people, and the invisible pathways across Australia sung into existence by the ancestors of Aboriginals. Both authors know that the stories they are telling are necessarily a collection of fragments that resist translation and appropriation. Yet thinking about these indigenous fragments can rescue us from the spiritual denials of our commercialised world. Finally, I follow Barry Lopez in suggesting ways in which readers of Chatwin’s and Martin’s texts can be inducted into a heightened ecological awareness, drawing on the senses, memory, and narrative to convert the places we know into the sacred spaces of our imagination.