“Perhaps the oldest oral library in the world was formed over a span of tens of thousands of years in the arid lands of central Australia. There, the Arrernte people developed a complex system of tribal knowledge, beliefs, duties, and ethics” and memorialized it in a series of stories. In the 1980s, Bruce Chatwin spent time in Australia studying Arrernte stories; when he published what he’d learned in the 1987 book Songlines. That book was a hit, hailed by critics and readers in the UK and US; the reaction in Australia was another matter.