"I had also been vaguely bored with my life and its repetitions - the half-finished, half-hearted attempts at different jobs and various studies; had been sick of carrying around the self-indulgent negativity which was so much the malaise of my generation, my sex and my class. So I had made a decision which carried with it things that I could not articulate at the time. […] And it struck me then that the most difficult thing had been the decision to act, the rest had been merely tenacity - and the fears were paper tigers. One really could act to change and control one's life; and the procedure, the process, was its own reward." - page 37
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| Tracks by Robyn Davidson |
Tagged as one woman's journey across 1,700 miles of Australian outback, Tracks is a depiction of so much more than Davidson's long walk with the company of four camels, a dog and her psyche across endless miles of Australian outback desert; it is an articulation of the rawest form of both physical and human nature. A critic from The Observer summarises it perfectly:
"It gets to the heart of landscape and solitude and becomes a venture to the interior of more than one dimension as its author approaches the hinterland of her own thorny psyche."
Davidson's trek across the desert is born as an idea largely left to the recesses of her mind in its legitimate existence as she spends several years in Alice Springs tending to/learning the ways of/gaining camels, preparing herself and inevitably prolonging the actuality of leaving for the journey. Eventually in 1977, having obtained her three camels, Zelekia, Dookie and Bub (the fourth, Gabriel, is the result of Zelekia turning out to be pregnant) and accepting a grant from The National Geographic magazine, she finally feels ready to embark upon (around) eight months spent travelling from the Glenn Helen Tourist Camp in the Northern Territory to Hamelin Pool in Western Australia. Across the 1700 mile stretch of a sandy ocean, narrated through a largely enjoyable self-deprecating, engaging and analytical literary voice, Davidson sheds her civilised self, loses the so-called European facade of identity and heart-acheingly her most valued companion, moreover seduces the reader into falling impotently in love with the rawness of Australian desert, her camels' personalities and a way of life free from labels and constrictions.
Side note: this is beginning to sound like the thematic constituents of a John Fowles novel, namely The French Lieutenant's Woman. Moving swiftly on...
I was surprised at the end to find that for her, it seemed, the journey was not one that irrevocably altered her life path or gave birth to a newly ambitious, strong, feminist woman as suggested by the synopsis and her given label - The Camel Lady. She writes in the novel's 2012 Postscript that she is not the same woman as she was when she began or ended the journey, that it was not intended to be a symbol for the world of the capability of women or of breaking boundaries; it was a journey intended to escape the banal rituals of everyday life and to rediscover herself, as it were, as she was at her core.
"The question I'm most commonly asked is 'Why?' A more pertinent question might be, why is it that more people don't attempt to escape the limitations imposed upon them? If Tracks has a message at all, it is that one can be awake to the demand for obedience that seems natural simply because it is familiar. Wherever there is pressure to conform (one person's conformity is often in the interests of another person's power), there is a requirement to resist. Of course I did not mean that people should drop what they were doing and head for the wilder places, certainly not that they should copy what I did. I meant that one can choose adventure in the most ordinary of circumstances. Adventure of the mind, or to use an old-fashioned word, the spirit." - page 256
Indeed reading Davidson's novel is itself an adventure of the mind - through her musings and thoughts. It was fascinating to explore snippets of her ideas on such a variation of topics as Feminism, Colonialism, Racism, the Environment etc. I particularly enjoyed her detailed discussion of the divide between Aboriginal and European Australians (although it's important to recognise that in the almost thirty years that have passed since then, such a relationship has shifted in its dynamics) as well as on the sheer stupidity of things regarded so cynically and importantly in our society. I won't expand dramatically on both points for fear of producing a monotonous, endless essay/rant. So instead, I'll list the pages which seemed of most note to me as I read, and briefly summarise my musings upon her propositions/observations.
I shan't expand upon the treatment of the Aborigines, but will leave you with a quote applicable in its connotations (underlined) to many wider areas other than Australia, that will occupy your sub-conscious paramountly. See pages 46, 121, 165, 167 and 192. The quote (page 46):
"It is my thesis that Aboriginal Australia underwent a rape of the soul so profound that the blight continues in the minds of most blacks today. It is this psychological blight, more than anything else, that causes the conditions we see on reserves and missions. And it is repeated down the generations." - Kevin Gilbert, Because A White Man'll Never Do It
I will expand, however, on the latter comment - the tantalisingly labelled stupid things of society. My favourite thing to read in Tracks was the psychological transition Davidson underwent; she begins the journey overladen with endless amounts of baggage - the photographer partnered with her for her National Geographic feature even buys her a portable exercise bike, despite the 30+ miles she'd be walking each day! - both of physical and mental weight. But by the end of the journey, she is down to the bare minimals; physically - a sarong, some socks, a jumper, the clothes on her back, an emergency kit, things to eat/drink with, and mentally - an innate understanding of the world and relief from constraining things such as time and social identity. See pages 191-192 and 196-197.
"Back there, there was no nakedness, no one could afford it. Everyone had their social personae well fortified until they got so drunk and stupid that their nakedness was ugly. Now why was this? Why did people circle one another, consumed with fear or envy, when all that they were fearing or envying was illusion? Why did people build psychological fortresses and barriers around themselves that would take a Ph.D. in safe-cracking to get through, which even they could not penetrate from the inside? And once again, I compared European society with Aboriginal. The one so archetypal paranoid, grasping, destructive, the other so sane." - page 197
How true is that? How many people are we truly ourselves with? In reality, don't we all have a school-personae, a home-personae, a work-personae, an alone-personae: we're only really ourselves when we're with ourselves. Therefore, how many of our relationships are legitimate, if they are formed upon facades and masks? It's such a challenging yet very real and relevant thing, that it seems to take ostracising oneself from all human contact, in the middle of the Australian outback and an outsider-looking-in perspective to recognise it for what it is. It's a very challenging concept, and I don't know if it's even viable to be 'ourselves' in all situations. In addition to highlighting this farcical element of society, Davidson underlined the often complete idiocy of the constraints we place upon ourselves through time and schedule and routine. As you can gather, Tracks makes for very interesting psycho-analytical reading.
Another predominant theme expressed by Davidson's experience is that of tourism, and the culture that it is developing into. I physically cringed at the depiction of how tourists and the media hounded Davidson and Aborigines she encountered throughout her journey, as well as their oblivious effect on the environment, decimating the wildlife and their habitats in the outback. In her Postscript, Davidson writes that
"The early seventies saw the beginning of group tourism and of the fashion for buying four-wheel drive vehicles to go bush in. It struck me even that the people in those vehicles, for the most part, were sealed against their environments, which they sped through without really seeing, without really connecting. Their cars bristled with two-way radios, they had sun creams, air conditioners, special bush clothes, refrigerators - they seemed burdened with stuff, and the stuff cut them off from the place they were in. For when you understand that country, it is the easiest thing imaginable to wander through it with minimal equipment." - page 259
It related to what I found from reading Palin's novel, Himalaya - that often the materialism of todays society detracts from our quality of life physically, and from our relationship with/understanding of the world around us. By this, I refer to the stupidity of things we cynically refer to as unequivocally important in our society.
To conclude this post on a lighter note, a random list.
A list of random books from my 'to-read' list:
- Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles - Richard Dowden
- Chasing the Dragon - Jackie Pullinger
- The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo - Saskia Sassen
- I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings - Dr Maya Angelou
- Out of Africa - Isak Dinesen
- Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
- Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive - Jared Diamond
- Pole to Pole - Michael Palin
- Mood Indigo - Boris Vian
- Last Words of Notable People - Mr William B Brahms
Note: I said they were random. Hence the incongruous themes and topics.
Now to watch the movie! Until next time,
C
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