Robyn Davidson (born September 6, 1950) is an Australian writer famous for his book Tracks, about a 1,700 mile journey across the deserts of western Australia using camels. His career and writing about his journey has been going on for over 30 years.
Video Robyn Davidson
Biography
Robyn Davidson was born in Stanley Park, a cattle ranch in Miles, Queensland, the second of two girls. Her mother died of suicide when Davidson was 11 years old, and she was mostly raised by her unmarried father's sister, Gillian. He went to a girls' boarding school in Brisbane. He received a music scholarship but did not take it. In Brisbane, Davidson shares the house with biologists and studies the zoology. Later, he went to Sydney and lived a bohemian life as a member of Push.
In 1975, Davidson moved to Alice Springs in an attempt to work with a camel to travel to the desert he had planned. For two years he trained camels and learned how to survive in the harsh desert. He was involved peripherally in the Aboriginal Land Rights movement.
For several years in the 1980s he had a relationship with Salman Rushdie, to whom he was introduced by their friend, Bruce Chatwin.
Davidson moved frequently, and had homes in Sydney, London, and India. He currently lives in Castlemaine, Victoria, Australia.
Maps Robyn Davidson
Tracks
In 1977, Davidson departed from Alice Springs to the west coast, with a dog and four camels, Dookie (big male), Bub (smaller males), Zeleika (wild woman), and Goliath (son of Zeleika). He had no intention of writing about the trip, but eventually agreed to write an article for National Geographic Magazine . After meeting photographer Rick Smolan in Alice Springs, he insisted that he became a photographer for the trip. Smolan, with whom she had a romantic "on-again off-again" relationship during the trip, drove out to meet her three times during the nine-month journey. The National Geographic article was published in 1978 and attracted much attention so Davidson decided to write a book about the experience. He went to London and lived with Doris Lessing while writing Tracks . Tracks won the first Thomas Cook Travel Book Award in 1980 and the Blind Community Award. In the early nineties, Smolan published a photograph of his journey in From Alice to Ocean . This includes the first interactive story-and-photos CD created for the general public.
It has been suggested that one of the reasons Song is so popular, especially with women, is that Davidson "puts himself in the wilderness by itself, not as an addition to a man".
The desert journey of Davidson is remembered by the natives of Australia whom he encountered along the way. Artist Jean Burke recalled Davidson in a painting entitled The Camel Lady produced for the Artists Warakurna exhibition in Darwin in 2011. Burke's father, Mr. Eddie, had crossed the Ngaanyatjarra area with Davidson, guiding him to water sources along Street. Davidson mentions Mr. Eddie at Tracks .
In 2013, the film adaptation directed by John Curran and starring Mia Wasikowska is completed. Movies Tracks are playing at the Venice Film Festival.
Nomads
The majority of Davidson's works have traveled together and studied nomadic peoples. Jane Sullivan in The Age writes that "when she is often called a social anthropologist", she has no academic qualification and claims to be "fully self-taught". Davidson's experience with the nomads included a nomadic migration trip in India from 1990 to 1992. The experience was published in Desert Places.
He has studied various forms of nomadic lifestyles - including in Australia, India, and Tibet - for a book and a series of documentaries. His writing on nomads is based primarily on personal experience, and he brings his thoughts together at No Fixed Address, his contribution to the Quarterly Essay series. Sullivan writes about this work:
One of the questions we need to ask, if we want to have a future, he says, is "Where do we cause less damage to ourselves, our environment, and our animal relatives?" One answer is: when we are nomadic. "That's when we decided that we became strangers in a foreign land, and wandering took the quality of eviction," he wrote, and then added, "I might be accused of romanticism."
References in popular culture
Davidson is the subject of a song written by Irish folk singer and songwriter Mick Hanly. The song, "Crusader", was recorded by Mary Black on her self-titled 1983 album.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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