Tracks (Paperback)

~ Robyn Davidson (Author) "I ARRIVED in the Alice at five a.m. with a dog, six dollars and a small suitcase full of inappropriate clothes..." (more)
Key Phrases: camel lady, community adviser, wild camels, Alice Springs, Ayers Rock, New York (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

Why does Robyn Davidson walk 1,700 miles across the Australian desert accompanied by four camels? Tracks is a quintessential adventure, yet the adventurer's relationship to her own quest is ambivalent and nuanced. She never directly explains her motivations, but it's clear that she's been driven to the starkness and isolation of the desert by something so personally powerful that she may not understand it herself. Ironically, when she accepts the financial backing of the National Geographic, her private "trial by fire" is doused by the popular concept of romantic independence she represents to others: "I was beginning to see it as a story for other people, with a beginning and an ending." She feels pursued and invaded by the photographer assigned to follow her, by the people who intercept her with questions and interpretations. Yet her ultimate confrontations are with her own rage and desperation, with the personal and cultural repercussions of racism and misogyny in her own experience, and with the paradoxical ugliness and beauty of the rural Australia she encounters. The integrity of this articulate and impassioned account is evident in the fact that Robyn Davidson does not find glib solutions to inner or outer conflicts. Like her camel companions, she seems temperamental, insatiable, and slightly crazy, but also determined, direct, vulnerable, and splendid. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Kirsten Backstrom

Product Description

A cult classic with an ever-growing audience, Tracks is the brilliantly written and frequently hilarious account of a young woman's odyssey through the deserts of Australia, with no one but her dog and four camels as companions. Davidson emerges as a heroine who combines extraordinary courage with exquisite sensitivity.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; First Vintage Books Edition, June 1995 edition (May 30, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679762876
• ISBN-13: 978-0679762874
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #213,425 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If she could do this, anything is possible!, June 2, 2001

By	Linda Linguvic (New York City) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)    (VINE VOICE)

Subtitled, "A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1,700 Miles of Australian Outback," this 1980 book by Robyn Davidson, then 30 years old, is now considered a classic. She did it alone, with four camels, a loyal dog, and all the self-doubt and introspection that make her very human. Ms. Davidson grew up in Adelaide, a city in Southern Australia, but she traveled to the Central Australian town of Alice Springs, arriving with just $6 in her pocket and a desire to learn about camels. She worked in a bar and apprenticed herself to a camel owner, performing menial jobs and learning all she could. It took two years and half the book, but finally she was ready to pursue her dream.

She never was able to accumulate the funds needed to outfit her camels and so she applied for and received a grant from National Geographic. Throughout the book she questions that decision because this meant she had to meet with a photographer on several parts of her journey as well as an onslaught of unwanted publicity. In her mind, the trip became less the pure expedition she had envisioned and there is much soul searching about this. This is not the only thing she constantly reflects about though. Throughout her 7-month trip, she questions everything, even at times, her own sanity. I learned not only about the harsh Australian Outback, the pleasures and problems of living with camels, and the plight of the Aboriginal people she met along the way. I also shared every nuance of her fears and inner journey, which was as complex and richly landscaped as the harsh and beautiful land around her and found myself laughing out loud at times at her offbeat sense of humor. And I watched her change from self-conscious timidity to a woman who gives up so many trappings of civilization that towards the end of the book she walks naked next to her camels, her skin browned and thickened to a leather-like consistency, heavy calluses on sandaled feet from walking 20 or 30 miles a day, and so far from the former civilized accouterments, that she doesn't care that menstrual blood is dripping down her legs.

There's little background information that explains why Ms. Davison undertook her journey and I never really understood her reasons for doing it. That didn't matter though. What did matter, however, is that she is a living example of someone who made choices to follow her own personal dream. And for that, she is an inspiration. Upon finishing the book I was left with the thought that if she could do this, anything is possible and I applaud this her for reminding me of this. Recommended.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Inspiring -- really!, January 12, 2000

By A Customer

It's a cliche to call books "inspiring," but this one really is -- not because Robyn Davidson is heroic, but because (as she points out repeatedly) she's an ordinary woman from a rather sheltered background, but with extraordinary determination, persistence, and resourcefulness. To her, the meaning of her journey is that anyone can achieve whatever they want to. But, she tellingly points out, many of the reporters who dogged her steps portrayed her as crazy because that blunted her message -- which, if women took it seriously, would rock the foundations of society. She's completely frank about her feelings, her doubts about her journey, and the excuses she makes to herself when she's tempted to quit; but, to me, this made her accomplishment even greater because she was fighting herself as well as external obstacles. The internal journey she underwent was as important as the external one, and those readers who complain that there's too much of the former and not enough of the latter are, I think, completely missing the point of the book.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 20 Years Old And Still Rocking, January 15, 2003

By	Gordon Hilgers (Dallas, Texas, USA) - See all my reviews

Who really knows why Robyn Davidson--a woman who describes herself in "Tracks" as a disaffected refugee of the superficiality of Sydney's and Melbourne's urban culture of the late 1970s--sold her belongings and trekked to Alice Springs, a tiny town nearly in the center of the Australian continent? Sure, plenty of us have trekked to Nowheresville in our youths, but from the first page of "Tracks," readers will immediately recognize that Davidson is not only leaving something, like Hemingway, she is searching for something as well. In light of a renewed interest in Aboriginal rights--and in the rights of Native Peoples everywhere on the planet--Davidson's seminal account of a grueling (and also rewarding) journey across one of the world's most forbidding wildernesses should prove to mainstream thinkers and commentators that Davidson had it right all along. Like Beryl Markham's "West With the Night," another account of a pioneering woman taking on what at the time was reserved for the so-called men of the world, Davidson's "Tracks" is not only filled with useful information (did you know "whoosh!", a word almost everyone in the English-speaking world, is actually an Afghani word that means "sit!"?), it is also one of the most readable adventure and travel books written in many years.

Davidson's commentary on Aussie society is sometimes as snide as she wants it to be, but it's always on the beam, and it's all telling too: Her observations of Aboriginal life, her plaintive advocacy for better treatment for a valuable human resource hidden away in the Southern Hemisphere and her descriptions of how Aboriginal religious beliefs are idiosyncratic to both the terrain and the atmosphere are things never written before, at least not without the help of abstractions and scientific jargon. In essence, then, this is a personal account, and a truthful one. Davidson was a young woman when she wrote "Tracks," but her wisdom at the time of writing was far beyond her years.