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

In 2006 political scientist Jeff Archer delivered a paper to the Australian Political Studies Association entitled 'Australian Indigeneity and Political Literature: Bruce Chatwin and Australian Politics'. The title's association of Bruce Chatwin with 'Political Literature' is intriguing given the English writer's well known ambivalence towards politics. Yet the paper is noteworthy, as an instance of the referencing of Chatwin in relation to Australian race debates while providing proof of the way Chatwin's celebrity, at least in Australia, has in large part been conditioned by those debates.