The paper analyses Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines in the context of travel writing. The first chapter reveals the construction of the traveller’s self, examining its ambiguous connection to the Romantic tradition of travel writing and the novel’s vision of nomadism. Since the Aboriginal worldview encapsulated in the idea of the Songlines can be described as an ontology based on the primacy of space, I scrutinize the representation of space in the novel before analysing its interpretation of the concept of the Songlines. I argue that text enacts its own understanding of the core of Aboriginal mythology through transforming the image of the “labyrinth of invisible pathways” into a self-reflexive metaphor. The inquiry into the meta-reflexive level of the text exposes how it presents the metaphorical linkage between travelling and the process of reading and writing, and how it subverts the narrative patterns that determine travel writing in general.