Robyn Davidson

Robyn Davidson was born in Queensland in 1950. In 1977 she walked alone from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean — 2,700 kilometres across the Western Australian desert — with four camels she had spent two years training and a dog called Diggity. National Geographic funded part of the journey on the condition that a photographer would occasionally join her; she hated this condition and has been ambivalent about it ever since.

Tracks (1980) is the account of the journey. It is not a triumphalist adventure memoir — Davidson was consistently uncomfortable with the heroising that attached to the journey, and the book is honest about the cost: the loneliness, the psychological pressure, the death of Diggity (shot by accident), the ambiguity of what it had achieved.

The book made her famous in ways she found difficult. She spent the following decades travelling — with nomads in India, in the Sahara, in Rajasthan — and writing about nomadism as a way of life rather than a one-off adventure. Her second book, Desert Places (1996), is about three years living intermittently with the Rabari nomads of Rajasthan.

She has also written a novel, Ancestors (1989), and various essays on feminism, environmentalism, and the politics of celebrity — the last of which she experienced firsthand and regarded with sustained suspicion.