Robyn Davidson
Davidson during her 1977 trek
Davidson during her 1977 trek
Born (1950-09-06) 6 September 1950
Miles, Queensland, Australia
OccupationWriter

Robyn Davidson (born 6 September 1950) is an Australian writer best known for her 1980 book Tracks, about her 2,700 km (1,700 miles) trek across the deserts of Western Australia using camels. Her career of travelling and writing about her travels has spanned 40 years. Her memoir is to be published in late 2023.

Biography

Robyn Davidson was born at Stanley Park, a cattle station in Miles, Queensland, the second of two girls. When she was 11 years old, her mother took her own life, and she was raised largely by her unmarried aunt (her father's sister), Gillian, and attended a girls' boarding school in Brisbane.[1] She received a music scholarship but did not take it up. In Brisbane, Davidson shared a house with biologists and studied zoology.

In 1968, aged 18, she went to Sydney and later lived a bohemian life in a Sydney Push household at Paddington, while working as a card-dealer at an illegal gambling house.[2][3]

In 1975, Davidson moved to Alice Springs, in an effort to work with camels for a desert trek she was planning. For two years, she trained camels and learned how to survive in the harsh desert. She was peripherally involved in the Aboriginal Land Rights movement.

For some years in the 1980s she was in a relationship with the Indian novelist, Salman Rushdie, to whom she was introduced by their mutual friend, Bruce Chatwin.[4]

Davidson has moved frequently, and has had homes in Sydney, London, and India.[5] As of 2014, she resides in Castlemaine, Victoria, Australia.[6]

Tracks

In 1977,[5] Davidson set off for Australia's west coast from Alice Springs, with a dog and four camels: Dookie (a large male), Bub (a smaller male), Zeleika (a wild female), and Goliath (Zeleika's offspring).[1] She had no intention of writing about the journey, but eventually agreed to write an article for the magazine National Geographic. Having met the photographer Rick Smolan in Alice Springs, she insisted that he be the photographer for the journey. Smolan, with whom she had an "on-again off-again" romantic relationship during the trip, drove out to meet her three times during the nine-month journey.

The National Geographic article was published in 1978[7] and attracted so much interest that Davidson decided to write a book about the experience. She travelled to London and lived with Doris Lessing while writing Tracks.[8] Tracks won the inaugural Thomas Cook Travel Book Award in 1980, and the Blind Society Award. In the early nineties, Smolan published his pictures of the trip in the book From Alice to Ocean.[9] It included the first interactive story-and-photo CD made for the general public.

It has been suggested that one of the reasons Tracks was so popular, particularly with women, is that Davidson "places herself in the wilderness of her own accord, rather than as an adjunct to a man".[10]

Her desert journey is remembered by Aboriginal Australians she encountered along the way. Artist Jean Burke remembers Robyn in a painting called The Camel Lady, which was produced in 2011 for a Warakurna Artists' exhibition in Darwin.[11] Burke's father, Mr Eddie, had trekked through Ngaanyatjarra lands with Davidson, guiding her to water sources along the way. She mentions Mr Eddie in Tracks.[12]

Film adaptation

2013 saw the release of a film adaptation of Davidson's book, also called Tracks, directed by John Curran and starring Mia Wasikowska.[13] It made its debut at the Venice Film Festival.[14]

Nomads

The majority of Davidson's work has been travelling with and studying nomadic peoples. In The Age newspaper, Jane Sullivan wrote that, "while she is often called a social anthropologist", she had no academic qualifications and said that she was "completely self-taught".[5] Davidson's experiences with nomads included travelling on migration with nomads in India from 1990 to 1992. Those experiences were published in Desert Places.[15]

She has studied different forms of the nomad lifestyle — including those in Australia, India, and Tibet — for a book and a documentary series. Her writing on nomads is based mainly on personal experience, and she brings many of her thoughts together in No Fixed Address, her contribution to the Quarterly Essay series.[5] Sullivan wrote about that work:

One of the questions we need to ask, if we are to have a future, she says, is "Where did we cause less damage to ourselves, to our environment, and to our animal kin?" One answer is: when we were nomadic. "It is when we settled that we became strangers in a strange land, and wandering took on the quality of banishment," she writes, and then later adds: "I shall probably be accused of romanticism".[5]

Davidson is the subject of a song written by Irish folk singer and songwriter Mick Hanly.[16][17] The song, "Crusader", was recorded by Mary Black on her 1983 self-titled album.

Bibliography

  • Davidson, Robyn (1980). Tracks. Vintage.
  • —; Thomas Keneally; Patsy Adam-Smith (1987). Australia: Beyond the Dreamtime. Facts on File.
  • — (September 1993). Travelling Light, a collection of essays. Harpercollins; Paperback Original edition.
  • — (1990). Ancestors. Australian Large Print.
  • — (1 November 1997). Desert Places, Pastoral Nomads in India (the Rabari). Penguin.
  • — (Summer 2000). "Marrying Eddie". Granta. 70: 53–67.
  • — (5 July 2002). The Picador Book of Journeys. Picador; New Ed edition.
  • — (2006). "No Fixed Address: Nomads and the Fate of the Planet". Quarterly Essay (24).
  • — (2023). Unfinished Woman. Bloomsbury.
Screenplays

References

  1. 1 2 Davidson, Robyn (30 May 1995). Tracks. Vintage. ISBN 0-679-76287-6.
  2. ↑ Krien, Anna (1 January 2012). "Robyn Davidson is a nomad". Dumbo Feather. Retrieved 15 November 2023.
  3. ↑ "Robyn Davidson". Australian Museum. Retrieved 15 November 2023.
  4. ↑ Bruce Chatwin, letter to Ninette Dutton, 1 November 1984, in Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin, ed. Elizabeth Chatwin and Nicholas Shakespeare, p. 395
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 Sullivan, Jane (9 December 2006). "The wonder of wander". The Age. Retrieved 15 November 2023.
  6. ↑ "Travels of the heart" by Amanda Hooton, The Age, GoodWeekend, 8 February 2014.
  7. ↑ Davidson, Robyn (May 1978). "Tracks". National Geographic.
  8. ↑ Davidson, Robyn (1980). Tracks. Jonathan Cape.
  9. ↑ Smolan, Rick; Davidson, Robyn (1992). From Alice to Ocean : Alone Across the Outback / photographed by Rick Smolan. Viking, in association with Against All Odds Productions.
  10. ↑ Falkiner (1992), p. 120.
  11. ↑ "Warakurna Art Centre". Warakurna Artists. Retrieved 15 November 2023.
  12. ↑ "Warakurna history paintings". The National Museum of Australia. Archived from the original on 24 July 2012. Retrieved 15 November 2023.
  13. ↑ Lodderhose, Diana (3 May 2012). "Mia Wasikowska heads Down Under for Tracks". Variety. Retrieved 23 May 2012.
  14. ↑ "Four Australian films screen at Venice". 9 News. AAP. 26 July 2013. Retrieved 15 November 2023.
  15. ↑ Davidson, Robyn (1997). Desert Places. Penguin Books.
  16. ↑ Smolan, Rick (24 April 2014). "Lone crusader: Robyn Davidson's epic desert trek". The Irish Independent.
  17. ↑ Crusader lyrics, Mary Black website
  18. ↑ Mail Order Bride at IMDb

Sources

  • Falkiner, Suzanne (1992). Wilderness. Writers' Landscape. East Roseville: Simon and Schuster.
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