Robyn Davidson Biography – Robyn Davidson Wiki
Robyn Davidson is an Australian writer best known for her 1980 book Tracks, about her 2,700 km (1,700 miles) trek across the deserts of Western Australia using camels. Her career of traveling and writing about her travels has spanned 40 years. She went to a girls’ boarding school in Brisbane. She received a music scholarship but did not take it up. In Brisbane, Robyn shared a house with biologists and studied zoology. In 1968, aged 18, she went to Sydney and later lived a bohemian life in a Sydney Push household at Paddington, while working as a card dealer at an illegal gambling house.
In 1975, she relocated to Alice Springs in an effort to work with camels for a desert trek she was planning. For two years she trained camels and learned how to survive in the harsh desert. She was peripherally involved in the Aboriginal Land Rights movement. Robyn has moved frequently and had homes in Sydney, London, and India. As of 2014, she was a resident of Castlemaine, Victoria, Australia.
In 1977, Robyn set off from Alice Springs for the west coast, with a dog and four camels, Dookie (a large male), Bub (a smaller male), Zeleika (a wild female), and Goliath (Zeleika’s offspring). She had no intention of writing about the journey but eventually agreed to write an article for the magazine National Geographic. Having met the photographer Rick Smolan in Alice Springs, she insisted that he be the photographer for the journey. Smolan, with whom she had an “on-again-off-again” romantic 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 so much interest that Robyn decided to write a book about the experience. She traveled to London and lived with Doris Lessing while writing Tracks. Tracks won the inaugural Thomas Cook Travel Book Award in 1980 and the Blind Society Award. In the early nineties, Smolan published his pictures of the trip in From Alice to Ocean. It included the first interactive story-and-photo CDs made for the general public.
It has been suggested that one of the reasons Tracks was so popular, particularly with women, is that Robyn “places herself in the wilderness of her own accord, rather than as an adjunct to a man”.
Her desert journey is remembered by Aboriginal Australians she encountered along the way. Artist Jean Burke remembers Robyn in a painting called The Camel Lady which was produced for a Warakurna Artists’ exhibition in Darwin in 2011. Burke’s father, Mr. Eddie, had trekked through Ngaanyatjarra lands with Robyn, guiding her to water sources along the way. Robyn mentions Mr. Eddie in Tracks.
In 2013, a film adaptation directed by John Curran and starring Mia Wasikowska was completed. The film Tracks was screened at the Venice Film Festival.
The majority of Robyn’s work has been traveling with and studying nomadic peoples. Jane Sullivan in The Age writes that “while she is often called a social anthropologist”, she has no academic qualifications and says that she is “completely self-taught”. Her experiences with nomads include traveling on migration with nomads in India from 1990 to 1992. These experiences were published in Desert Places.
She has studied different forms of the nomad lifestyle — including those in Australia, India, and Tibet — for a book and a documentary series. Her writing on nomads is based mainly on personal experience, and she brings many of her thoughts together in No Fixed Address, her contribution to the Quarterly Essay series. Sullivan writes about this work: One of the questions we need to ask if we are to have a future, she says, is “Where did we cause less damage to ourselves, to our environment, and to our animal kin?” One answer is: when we were nomadic. “It is when we settled that we became strangers in a strange land, and wandering took on the quality of banishment,” she writes, and then later adds: “I shall probably be accused of romanticism”.
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 1983 self-titled album. The film Tracks is based on Robyn Davidson’s memoir of the same name.
Robyn Davidson Age
She was born on September 6, 1950, in Miles, Queensland, Australia.
Robyn Davidson Husband
She is not married. She was in a relationship with photographer Rick Smolan as she traveled with him through the desert. For some years in the 1980s, she was in a relationship with the Indian novelist, Salman Rushdie, to whom she was introduced by their mutual friend Bruce Chatwin.
On August 12, 2022, while about to start a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York, Rushdie was attacked by a man who rushed up onto the stage and stabbed him repeatedly, including to the neck. The attacker was pulled away before being taken into custody; Rushdie was airlifted to a hospital in Erie, Pennsylvania, where he underwent surgery. Attendees critiqued the lax security measures in place. In the years prior to the stabbing, Rushdie traveled without a security detail. PEN America noted that the attack had no precedence in American history. The New York Times reported that the incident sent “ripples of ‘shock and horror’ through the literary world”.
Robyn Davidson Family
She was born at Stanley Park, a cattle station in Guluguba, Queensland, the youngest of two girls. When she was 11 years old, her mother committed suicide, and she was largely brought up by her unmarried aunt (her father’s sister), Gillian.
Robyn Davidson Instagram
Her Instagram handle is @therobyndavidson.
