Robyn Davidson (born 6 September 1950) is an Australian writer best known for her book Tracks, about her 1,700-mile trek across the deserts of west Australia using camels. Her career of travelling and writing about her travels has spanned forty years. Contents

Biography Edit

Robyn Davidson was born at Stanley Park, a cattle station in Miles, Queensland, the second of two girls. Her mother died by suicide when Davidson was 11, and she was largely raised by her father's unmarried sister, Gillian. She went to 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 Salman Rushdie, to whom she was introduced by their mutual friend Bruce Chatwin.[4] Davidson has moved frequently, and had homes in Sydney, London, and India.[5] She currently resides in Castlemaine, Victoria, Australia.[6]

Tracks Edit

Nomads Edit

The majority of Davidson's work has been travelling with and studying nomadic peoples. Jane Sullivan in The Age writes that 'while she is often called a social anthropologist', she has no academic qualifications and claims to be "completely self-taught".[5] Davidson's experiences with nomads include traveling on migration with nomads in India from 1990 to 1992. These experiences were published in Desert Places.[14] 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 writes about this 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]

References in popular culture Edit

Davidson is the subject of a song written by Irish folk singer and songwriter Mick Hanly.[15] The song, "Crusader", was recorded by Mary Black on her 1983 self-titled album. The film Tracks is based on Davidson's memoir of the same name.

Works Edit