The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin (Viking: $18.95; 293 pp.)

Bruce Chatwin begins in Alice Springs, Australia, drives into the Outback and then caroms everywhere on Earth, carrying the reader to the beginning of human time and projecting the reader into a world of potential peace predicated on movement. Not a political or social movement, but movement for its own sake.

“The Songlines” is a travel book of panoramic hypotheses and cross-cultural analogies, an attempt to discover the universal qualities of human nature in specific nature itself, using nomadic aboriginal tribes as his advance men to a philosophy of migratory life. The book, like a green Michelin guide, has some familiar simple terms and some quite foreign ones as Chatwin, novelist and globe-trotter, argues that people were born to be restless. Especially in places where life is most difficult, life itself depends on motion: “Most of Outback Australia was arid scrub or desert where rainfall was always patchy and where one year of plenty might be followed by seven years of lean. To move in such a landscape was survival: to stay in the same place suicide.”

The aborigines, then, developed their “songlines” as signposts to where their forebears had been, as cries of their own identities. What whites describe as “dream tracks” are the vocal chants of territory and ancestral truth and tribal culture--even trade. A person’s being is inscribed on an oval plaque called a tjuringa : “It is both musical score and mythological guide to the Ancestor’s travel . . . . It is a man’s alter ego ; his soul; his obol to Charon; his title deed to country; his passport and his ticket ‘back in.’ ” The plaque tells the aborigine his origins, in terms of animals, plants and in celebration of place.

Too much myth or mumbo jumbo for you? Then read the book as a contemporary search and rescue mission, the good seekers trying to save the native peoples from exploitation. Meet the improbable but lovable Arkady Volchok, an Australian of Cossack descent whose overt job is to help the railroads find a way through aborigine territory without violating aborigine rights or taboos. His covert job, self-assigned, is protecting tribes from the modern world.

Volchok and Chatwin share adventures in the bush and the bottle while helping mediate intertribal arguments and extratribal antagonisms. Volchok gets the girl; Chatwin gets the book. Aborigines and allies live happily ever after--or at least until the end of the story. Once again, the native is noble; the civilized intruder is not.

The travels to the Outback are an entertainment, told lightly and well. The travels to the inner meaning of life are bumpier going. Chatwin interrupts his narrative about halfway through to give the reader heaps of quotations and stacks of ruminations on the human wanderer, collected in moleskin notebooks kept from prior travels.

The materials have merit but are hurled into the manuscript without transitions or apology: From Pascal: “Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.” From the “Universal History” of Ib’n Khaldun: “The Desert People are closer to being good than settled peoples because they are closer to the First State and are more removed from all the evil habits that have infected the hearts of settlers.” From Proust: “As a general rule of biology, migratory species are less ‘aggressive’ than sedentary ones. . . . The migration itself, like the pilgrimage, is the hard journey, a ‘leveler’ on which the ‘fit’ survive and stragglers fall by the wayside. The journey thus preempts the need for hierarchies and shows of dominance. The ‘dictators’ of the animal kingdom are those who live in an ambiance of plenty. The anarchists, as always, are the ‘gentlemen of the road.’ ”

So keep moving, as Satchel Paige is alleged to have said. Settlers tend to hoard, wanderers to share. Selfishness, in effect, becomes protective; wanderers tend to share, in effect to be generous. People go to war over drawn-but-disputed boundary lines. Aborigines live within an uncharted peace and poetry of songlines.

Chatwin uses Bedouin and Indian proverbs to buttress his case against needing a house for a home. He cites Konrad Lorenz’s work on animal behavior and human aggression. And he offers the findings of Dr. John Bowlby at the Tavistock Clinic in London as evidence at birth: Any normal baby will scream if left alone; the best way to quiet a baby is to pick up the child, bouncing and walking the infant to contentment.

“The Songlines” bounces us through poetry, occasional profundity and enough universal melodies for the reader to remember. What it lacks is orchestration, leaving the admiring reader to scream for a better arrangement, one that might have made the footnotes part of the travel rather than mere signs of the general direction.