Following the Songlines: Myth and Creation in Bruce Chatwin’s and Wim Wenders’s Works

In Australian Aboriginal culture, the origin myth is related to the belief in mysterious ‘songlines’ or ‘dreaming tracks’ that would cross the Australian desert. According to this myth, the world would have been created by legendary Ancestors while walking and singing about what they saw. In recent years, Aboriginal culture fascinated artists such as Bruce Chatwin and Wim Wenders, who referred to the ‘dreaming tracks’ respectively in the book “The Songlines” (1987) and in the movie “Bis ans Ende der Welt” (1991). This essay explores why Aboriginal cosmogonic myth was a powerful metaphor for artistic creation in the works of both Chatwin and Wenders, focusing on the relationship between dreams, travel and writing. ‘By singing the world into existence’—Chatwin wrote in “The Songlines”—‘the Ancestors had been poets in the original sense of poesis, meaning creation’.