Robyn Davidson

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Robyn Davidson

Robyn Davidson
Born September 6, 1950 (1950-09-06) (age 57)
Miles, Queensland, Australia
Occupation Writer

Robyn Davidson (born September 6, 1950) is an Australian writer best known for her book Tracks, about a 1,700-mile trek across the deserts of west Australia using camels. Her career of travelling and writing about her travels has spanned over 30 years.

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[edit] Biography

Davidson was born at Stanley Park, a cattle station in Miles, Queensland, and went to a girls' boarding school in Brisbane[1]. Her mother committed suicide when Davidson was 11, and she was largely raised by her father's sister, Gillian. She received a music scholarship but did not take it up. In Brisbane she shared a house with radical biologists, and studied Zoology. Later, she went to Sydney and lived a bohemian kind of life as a member of the Push.

In the 1970s, 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.

In 1984, Davidson had a three-year relationship with the writer Salman Rushdie after meeting him as he travelled in Australia with her friend Bruce Chatwin.[citation needed]

She has had homes in Sydney, London and India.[2]

[edit] Tracks

In 1977[2], she set off from Alice Springs for the west coast, with a dog and four camel, Dookie (a large male), Bub (a smaller male), Zelieka (a wild female) and Goliath (Zelieka's son)[1]. She had had no intention of writing about the journey, but eventually succumbed to agree to write an article for National Geographic Magazine. Having met the photographer, Rick Smolan, in Alice Springs, she insisted that he be the photographer for the journey. Rick drove out to meet her three times during the nine month journey. The National Geograpahic article was published in 1978[3], and caused so much interest, that she decided to write a book about the event. She traveled to London and lived with Doris Lessing, while writing Tracks. The book won the 1980 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Blind Society Award. In the early nineties Smolan published his pictures of the trip, in From Alice to Ocean. It included the first interactive story-and-photo CDs made for the general public.

It has been suggested that one of the reasons Tracks was so popular, particularly with women, is because Davidson "places herself in the wilderness of her own accord, rather than as an adjunct to a man".[4]

[edit] Nomads

The majority of her work has been traveling with and studying nomadic peoples. While she is often called a social anthropologist, she has no academic qualifications and claims to be "completely self-taught".[2] Her experience with nomads include traveling on migration with nomads in India, from 1990 to 1992. These experiences were published in Desert Places.

She has studied different forms of the nomad lifestyle - including 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.[2] 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."[2]

[edit] References in Popular Culture

Davidson is the subject of a song written by Irish folk singer and song writer, Mick Hanley (lyrics). The song, Crusader, was recorded by Mary Black on her 1983 self-titled album.

[edit] Works

  • Davidson, Robyn (May 30, 1995). Tracks (in English). Vintage. ISBN 0679762876. 
  • Davidson, Robyn; Thomas Keneally and Patsy Adam-Smith (1987). Australia : beyond the Dreamtime (in English). Facts on File. ISBN 0816019223. 
  • Davidson, Robyn (September 1993). Travelling Light, a collection of essays (in English). Harpercollins; Paperback Original edition. ISBN 0207180342. 
  • Mail Order Bride (Feature film for Australian Broadcasting Commission)
  • Davidson, Robyn (1990). Ancestors (in English). Australian Large Print. ISBN 1863402926. 
  • Davidson, Robyn (November 1, 1997). Desert Places, pastoral nomads in India (the Rabari) (in English). Penguin. ISBN 0140267972. 
  • Davidson, Robyn (July 5, 2002). The Picador Book of Journeys (in English). Picador;New Ed edition. ISBN 033036863X. 
  • Davidson, Robyn (2006). "No Fixed Address: nomads and the fate of the planet". Quarterly Essay (issue 24). 
  • Self Portrait with Imaginary Mother (unfinished)[5]

[edit] External links

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b Davidson, Robyn (May 30, 1995). Tracks (in English). Vintage. ISBN 0679762876. 
  2. ^ a b c d e Sullivan, Jane (2006) "The wonder of wander", The Age, 2006-12-07
  3. ^ Davidson, Robyn (May 1978). "Tracks". National Geographic Society. 
  4. ^ Falkiner (1992) p. 120
  5. ^ Robyn Davidson. Australian National University.

[edit] References

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