Why a Booktrail?
1970s- One Woman’s Quest across 1,7000 miles of hostile Australian desert with only four camels and a dog for company on a very special and personal journey
Tracks
What you need to know before your trail
A journey on foot across a vast expanse of the Australian desert is also a journey of discovery of a single woman’s desire to challenge herself, training camels and proving that in the 1970s, women could do what they wanted even if the men only bars in Alice Springs would make you think differently.
Australia of the 1970s was different to the country we see today and Davidson gives a unique view of this changing landscape geographically as well as politically and socially as she walks, talks and immerses you in the setting via all of your senses.
Travel Guide
Just some of the route – Glen Helen Tourist Camp (nr Alice Springs)
Redbank Gorge, Areyonga, Tempe Downs, Mount Olga, Docker River
Wingelinna, Warburton, Carnegie, Cunyu, Dalgety Downs, Woodleigh, and finally Hamelin Pool where the track came to an end.
No reading of Tracks would be possible without discovering a whole new world where camels have individual personalties, can get easily injured and get up to some funny antics when you least expect it.
Before the journey even starts, Robyn learns how to care for camels, to prepare for the trip and to ensure as best she can that the camels will survive as she will. Her work and friendliness towards them, the relationship she builds with them is as much a part of the story as the setting and journey itself.
As for the journey, it is a tough and arduous one. The walk, sense of time and space is cleverly evoked –
“I entered a new time, space, dimension. A thousand years fitted into a day and aeons into each step…”
“Clouds rolled in and clouds rolled out and always the road, always the road, always the road, always the road.”
Throughout her journey She is respectful to her surroundings and travel camels (nursing them when they fall sick) and those she meets , such as the Aboriginal people.
“Trying to describe Aboriginal cosmology briefly is like trying to explain quantum mechanics in five seconds. Besides, no amount of anthropological detail can begin to convey Aboriginal feeling for their land. It is everything — their law, their ethics, their reason for existence.”
So much discovery and so much discovered yet sadly the author writes that the journey would not be possible now – too much red tape, tourists and a world in which is harder and harder to lose yourself in. Walk with her with this book.
Where Next?
