Tracks

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.


Inspiring -- really!   January 13, 2000
14 out of 14 found this review helpful

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.


20 Years Old And Still Rocking   January 15, 2003
Gordon Hilgers (Dallas, Texas, USA)
13 out of 13 found this review helpful

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.


Tracks was shockingly bad, really really bad.   October 1, 1999
10 out of 39 found this review helpful

In Tracks by Robyn Davidson, the author depicts the events of her solo journey across 1,700 miles of Australian desert. She also expresses her views on camels, Aborigines, and just about everything imaginable. The content of Tracks was not quite what I expected it would be. I was anticipating an adventure novel with stories about encounters with deadly snakes, dealing with incredible heat, and nearly dying of thirst. My predictions were totally off the mark. One of the things I found surprising about this book was the depth with which she described her own feelings. It is not often that you read an autobiography that depicts the thoughts and feelings of the author during specific events. She even described her feelings for other people, good or bad, which astonished me. She held nothing back. Another thing I found surprising was the honesty with which she wrote the book. She didn't try to come across as an incredibly brave person. In fact, she expressed the fact that she considered not even doing the journey at all. She also wrote a lot about aborigines and what the Australian government has done to them. None of what I have described in this paragraph was mentioned on the back cover. To be perfectly honest, I found Tracks to be rather boring. I was looking forward to reading about an exciting adventure. Instead, I learned about everything that's wrong with Australian men and what she thinks the government should do concerning Aborigines. These may be noteworthy topics, but if this is what the book is about then it should be advertised that way, not as a thrilling adventure novel! In my opinion, this book was written so that Robyn Davidson's thoughts (on just about everything) could be heard. If anyone is looking for a book written by an overly opinionated woman, you should read Tracks.


Quite simply, my favorite book of all time   June 16, 1998
Andree Rose (arc139@psu.edu) (State College, PA)
9 out of 10 found this review helpful

I first discovered Tracks during the boring period of my life, when I was a bank manager. Since then, my whole life has changed, and with Robyn Davidson as inspiration, I am much more of an adventuress. What I like best about this book is the soulful, brave way Robyn shares her inner journey...her attitudinal shifts, the way in which she sheds the trappings and conventions of society for something more real, a life lived closer to the bone. It's a must-read on a number of levels...I still re-read it once a year just to remind myself that there are places left to travel and inner realms to be explored.