Interesting read

This account of Robyn Davidson's trek across the Australian outback with four camels and a dog does what all great books do - it makes you run through the whole gamut of emotions. I experienced moments of intense dislike towards the narrator, anger at her actions, joy at her triumphs and tears over her heartbreak and losses. The most famous photos from this expedition show a young, pretty sarong-clad Robyn at the end of her journey cavorting in a turquoise Indian ocean with her camels. It is an idyllic scene that has very little to do with her actual story, as she points out throughout the book. Based on this image I expected an Eat, Pray, Love type of journey towards personal enlightenment, but thankfully Tracks is so much more than this. First the things I disliked: It's very hard to reconcile Davidson's view that camel's are wonderful, intelligent, noble creatures with the descriptions of her gunning down wild bucks in the desert. She did this to protect her own camels because the young males can be highly aggressive and dangerous, but it would have been apparent to her from the first that killing camels would be necessary on this trip and I still don't really understand how she justified it. These creatures were doing nothing wrong and they died, often in agony because her journey was more important to her than their lives. At the very least she could have learnt to shoot straight to avoid causing them much needless suffering. Her sense of entitlement over wild creatures is apparent from the beginning when she tells the psychopathic Kurt that she wants a baby crow to raise. They hunt for nests and find one crow with a very engaging personality that they decide to steal a baby from, but Kurt brings down the whole nest, killing three babies out of four in the process. Davidson expresses her horror and sorrow over this, but doesn't really own her responsibility. She is extremely angry about the way Indigenous people and the land have been treated but never acknowledges that at time she too is an oppressor. For example she "beats the crap" out of one of her camels because it became frightened when something fell off its pack, but then writes unselfconsciously about the land being "conquered, fenced up and beaten into submission." Rick is the one who makes reference to her moral culpability at the end, when he sits up in his sleep and accuses her of killing her camels parents in order to bring them on her journey. To her credit, Davidson claims that there is some deep truth in his words. Another thing that bothered me was Davidson's mixed feelings towards the end of the book about segregation of Aborigines from a dance in one of the towns she visits. Her companions were outraged but Davidson had formed a strong attachment to station people and she claims that their racism came down to the fact that they couldn't understand why the Aborigines didn't share their Protestant work ethic. After railing against the casual racism of all the redneck townsfolk and tourists she comes across on her trip I found her attempt to whitewash (pun intended) the prejudices of the very people whose forebears drove Indigenous people from their sacred land to be extremely disingenuous. Apart from this, Tracks is a very honest book and this is its saving grace. Davidson doesn't try to glorify her journey or downplay its hardships. Although there would have been a lot of misogyny and backwardness in outback Australia at this time her difficulties with other people can't be blamed totally on this. She manages to alienate a lot of people and it's easy to see why she chose the company of animals over humans. In many ways she is running from her problems rather than confronting them but in the process she learns a great deal about herself. She has a genuine respect for Aboriginal culture and a desire to immerse herself in the land and see the world from a different perspective. I could relate to her need to strip away all of the facades and illusions of "civilisation" and see what was left. At first I was preoccupied with the 'whys' of this journey but by the end it didn't matter. There are some beautiful passages describing the peace and sense of wholeness that Davidson found in the outback, but just when you think that she has found the what she was seeking something tragic and heartbreaking happens to throw her back into turmoil. This is a complex book about a complex woman and its lessons can't be reduced to a few sentences. It's also a wonderful snapshot of the Australian outback at a certain point in history and it gives some excellent insights into the Indigenous struggle for identity. I find it so sad that places like Utopia, described in the book as a thriving community, have degenerated so badly and that the grip of mining companies has tightened over the land. All of the forces working against the outback and the Aboriginal people have only grown stronger over the last three decades and that is a terrible tragedy.

You can rarely find books like this anymore, since most of our true wilderness and desert areas have become diminished, destroyed, taken over by governments or big exploitation companies, or global warming. This is an amazing book in that a lone Australian young woman has the courage and tenacity to set out to do what most would consider impossible - cross 2000 miles of barren Australian desert with camels and a dog. While she does receive some external assistance, both financial (from National Geographic) and personal (from friendly ranchers and aboriginal settlements) on the way, for the most part she is on her own and, despite the harsh physical, emotional, and psychological challenges finishes her journey. What makes the book so interesting is not just the description of her journey, but her observations and thoughts on her life, her country, other people, and life in general. It's a real page turner, and never gets bogged down in boring or irrelevant details. A true adventure, and a wonderful story.

This is a marvelous little book. It is at once, inspiring, scary, and thoughtful. For me, it has earned a place beside Wild (Cheryl Strayed) and The Camino (Shirley MacLaine) among my favorite works of personal enlightenment found through the seeker’s journey. It is distinctive, however, in being grittier, less “ethereal,” than is usual in such memoirs. I think that comes from the honesty of Ms Davidson’s self-examination. As such, the book tells a tale that many people will be able to identify with, even considering the scope of what Ms Davidson did. What she did was to travel across 1700 miles of the Australian outback in 1977 when she was 27 years old. Tracks is her memoir of that journey. Ms Davidson spends very little time on her life before the journey. There was no single event that she relates as being the reason for doing what she did. She simply starts at the time when she arrived in Alice Springs and began looking for someone to teach her camel-handling, and for a job (in that order). It was her intention from the start to make the trek with camels (to carry her provisions; she mostly walked the trip) and she spent the most of two years learning how to do that (and she’s an obvious animal lover). This prep time is a major part of her story and she spends almost the first half of the book on it. As for her reasons for making the trip, she tells of two major ones. The first is that aspect of self-discovery that was her main driving force. As she says, she did it “to unclog my brain of all its extraneous debris.” Like Thoreau, she wanted to be alone and vulnerable so she could see reality in its unmitigated form. In recounting this, she provides the reader with an intimate picture of the Australian desert of the 1970s. She also wanted to know the Aborigines in their natural environment. She wanted to discover their culture in their own context. She offers a lot of commentary on this. What she finds is, to me, a residual of a tribal culture that the current global culture is hell-bent on exterminating (I refer you to Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael books for insight on this). Tracks is very well written. You can see why Ms Davidson went on to be an author and travel-writer. Her prose is solid and her storytelling is engaging enough to pull the reader along (there are a few Australian colloquialisms that necessitate explanatory notes, but they just add color). She is not as metaphoric as Cheryl Strayed or as ethereal in tone as Shirley MacLaine, but she is a pleasure to read. She is also brutally honest in what she relates, whether it be the trials of working with camels, suffering the idiocy of boorish Outback men, dealing with a psycho camel-handler, or balancing the purity of her journey-of-discovery with her relationship to National Geographic photographer, Rick Smolan (who beautifully photographed Ms Davidson’s journey). Ms Davidson’s memoir is very introspective and she weaves her observations throughout the narrative. You would expect this in a “personal discovery” book, but she does it very convincingly. Following her thoughts in trying to understand her journey is very compelling and the postscript essay she added in 2012 shows that process still going on with her. What really grabbed my attention, though, was a few mentions of Ms Davidson’s encounters with the paranormal. They are outstanding because they are in such stark contrast with the rest of her writing, which is very no-nonsense and down-to-earth. I take this as another confirmation that most people don’t believe in the supernatural until they experience it. I highly recommend Tracks as a memoir of an epic journey of enlightenment by a very capable writer. It’s also a window into a particular time before CGI movies, the Internet, and chem-trails. It is a powerful addition to the literature of self-discovery, and to my list of favorite books.