Tracks by Robyn Davidson

And it was perhaps the cold desolate lovelessness of the place that threw into sharp focus the magical and life-affirming qualities of the country around it. To enter that country is to be choked with dust, suffocated by waves of thrumming heat, and driven to distraction by the ubiquitous Australian fly; it is to be amazed by space and humbled by the most ancient, bony, awesome landscape on the face of the earth. It is to discover the continent's mythological crucible, the great outback, the never-never, that decrepit desert land of infinite blue air and limitless power. It seems ridiculous now, to talk of my growing sense of freedom given the feudal situation I was living in, but anything could be mended, anything forgotten, any doubt withstood during a walk through those timeless boulders, or down that glittering river-bed in the moonlight.

In the late 1970's, Robyn Davidson moved to Alice Springs, the town at the center of Australia's Outback, with one goal in mind: to obtain and train a group of camels in order that she might walk from the center of the country to the Western Australia coast. The trip, as Davidson describes it, is not just about getting to know the country, but getting to know oneself: alone for long stretches of time with only the camels and her dog, walking across some of the most featureless and inhospitable landscape on Earth, Davidson becomes not just independent and self-sufficient, but in tune with herself in a way that's not possible in Brisbane, or even in old ramshackle Alice. This is a kind of book that has become popular in recent memory--I'm thinking of Cheryl Strayed's Wild--but whereas those books always seem to be a kind of marketing strategy, when Davidson writes about self-actualization, I tended to believe her, not least because of the incandescent rage she expresses toward the demons of the press that want to turn her into tomorrow's headline.

Close to half the book is taken up with the preparations for the trip, which involve taking small jobs in restaurants and ranches in Alice Springs. I was really interested in Davidson's discussion of anti-Aboriginal racism in Tracks: the Alice Springs of the 1970's she describes is a place where whites drop slurs as easily as spitting on the ground. (It's also a place disproportionately filled with men, who frequently threaten young women like Davidson with rape.) Davidson paints herself as kind of a hothead who often leaps to the defense of Aboriginal Australians, and it's this fervor that really makes her seem honest and impolitic, though I would suggest there's a kind of blindness, too, in the way she throws around suggests of Aboriginal "demise." Later, on the trip itself, she's briefly joined by an Aboriginal man named Eddie who takes her through some of the track that she would not, and in fact would not be allowed according to Aboriginal tradition, traverse on her own. These sections, which depict a kind of free camaraderie despite a real language barrier, are some of the most charming of the novel. When Eddie leaves and Davidson faces the last, deadliest stretch of the trip, the book's tragic elements return to the forefront.

If this were a book about traversing an American desert, you might expect some stunning descriptions of landmarks, well-known and not. But the Australian desert is not like the American one; it's featurelessness is part of the essential nature that draws Davidson to it, and it's not possible--or so I gather, and so I understood as I crossed it by air a few weeks back--to impose a mental geography on it, unless perhaps you are an Aboriginal Australian moving along a songline, perhaps. So the focus, for the most part, becomes on Davidson herself, her self-sufficiency and stubbornness. (Though I really liked her description of what was then called "Ayers Rock," which she explains that no tourist mob could ever really reduce or diminish.) I thought it was especially funny how Davidson spent 100 pages talking shit about the clueless photographer that National Geographic sent to snap photos of her, right up to the point where she sleeps with him. That kind of hotheadedness and brashness is what makes you like Davidson, and what makes you believe in her.