Tracks - Robyn Davidson

Robyn Davidson did something as a twenty-seven-year-old back in 1977 that would be almost impossible today: she and her four camels made a (mostly) solo 1700-mile trek from Alice Springs, Australia all the way across the Australian desert to the Indian Ocean. As Davidson puts it in her postscript to the 2012 edition of Tracks:

“Could such a journey be made in the same way now? No, absolutely not. There would be many more people out there with many more ways of keeping tabs on you, more red tape to hold you back,  more no-go areas, more fences, more vehicles, more control. New communication technology would make it impossible to get lost no matter how hard you tried.”

Things have changed so much, in fact, that Davidson admits to finding it “painful and difficult” to revisit that part of Australia at all. But back in the day, things were much simpler, if not more primitive, in nature. Davidson had grown bored with the life she was living, especially with the several jobs she had by then experienced and with her various studies. She was more of a loner than any of her friends and family, and very much enjoyed her own company. So, what could be more natural for a young woman like her than six months or so spent all alone in literally the middle of nowhere?

There was one slight problem, however. Davidson knew that the best way to make it across such a wide expanse of desert was with the help of camels. And she knew nothing, absolutely nothing, about camels other than that she wanted to capture three or four of the wild desert camels, break them, and train them as pack animals. Easier said than done, of course, so Davidson ended up working eight months for a man who promised to teach her everything she needed to know and to pay her by giving her two fully-trained camels of her own. What Robyn Davidson experienced in Alice Springs makes up over one-third of Tracks, and very little of it is pretty. The Alice Springs that Davidson endured for those months was so racist and misogynistic that she suffered from severe depression much of the time she was there preparing for her great adventure.

But what an adventure it turns out to be.

In order to make the trip possible at all, Davidson did something that must have felt to her as if she had just sold her soul to the devil. For four thousand dollars, she agreed to allow a National Geographic photographer to join her along the way three or four times so that the magazine could do an expansive article on her and her trip through the desert. It was only with that money, however, that she was able to outfit herself with the equipment she needed to survive in the desert on her own. And despite what started out as a rocky relationship between her and the photographer, her trip may have ended disastrously without his help. At the very least, her experience was changed for the better. 

Bottom Line: Tracks is quite an amazing true adventure story, and Robyn Davidson was very frank about everything she saw and experienced during her journey. It is a book I strongly recommend to readers who enjoy reading about what I generally classify as “long walks” taken by one or two brave people who want to experience the planet in a way so few of us will ever manage to experience it for ourselves. There is also a movie version of Tracks by the same title out there, and it is sometimes pretty good despite failing to give much of a real sense of what Davidson went through in order to prepare for the trip or just how tortuous her days sometimes were. Even though the movie ticks off most of the milestone boxes of Davidson’s great adventure, it really comes nowhere near to meaningfully telling what her experiences were like. Do yourself a favor; read the book first.  

May 1978 National Geographic cover featuring Robyn Davidson's adventure