Aboriginal ancestors are said to have sung the world into existence as they walked, leaving invisible 'Dreaming-tracks' that cross the continent as a web of melodic lines. A person who knows the song can navigate unfamiliar country by its rhythm and verse, because the musical contour encodes the shape of the terrain itself, making the song a map that doubles as a title deed to the land it describes.
Chatwin argues that restlessness and the urge to walk are not pathologies but an inheritance from a nomadic past in which seasonal movement was the normal human condition, so settled life produces a chronic unease. He proposes that much of what we treat as aggression or boredom is displaced wanderlust, the frustrated instinct of an animal built to keep moving.
Drawing on fossil evidence of a big cat preying on early hominids, Chatwin suggests that a specific beast selecting our ancestors for flight and vigilance shaped human fear, cooperation and the instinct to move. The Dragon, Beast or Devil of later myth, on this view, is the cultural memory of that original predator rather than pure invention.
Chatwin travels the outback by car with companions who sing their country as they pass through it, and he observes a songman involuntarily speeding up or slowing his singing to match the vehicle's pace, because the verses must be sung at the tempo of walking the land they describe. This concrete episode is his evidence that the songs are literally bound to physical movement across specific terrain.