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.
When she was 11 years old, her mother took her own life, and she was raised largely by her unmarried aunt (her father's sister), Gillian, and attended a girls' boarding school in Brisbane.
Davidson said later that she would often recall Mahomet's advice and warnings, especially when faced with the ferocity of in-season wild camels eyeing her herd.
[citation needed] The National Geographic article was published in 1978[8] and attracted so much interest that Davidson decided to write a book about the experience.
[citation needed] It has been suggested that one of the reasons Tracks was so popular, particularly with women, is that Davidson "places herself in the wilderness of her own accord, rather than as an adjunct to a man".
[12][13] Burke's father Mr Eddie, a Pitjantjatjara man, had trekked through Ngaanyatjarra lands with Davidson, guiding her to water sources along the way.
[15] 2013 saw the release of a film adaptation of Davidson's book, also called Tracks, directed by John Curran and starring Mia Wasikowska.
In The Age newspaper, Jane Sullivan wrote that, "while she is often called a social anthropologist", she had no academic qualifications and said that she was "completely self-taught".
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.
"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".
[7]Davidson was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in the King's Birthday Honours List in June 2024.
In 2024 Davidson was interviewed by Indira Naidoo for episode 9 of the 38th series of Compass on ABCTV For three years in the 1980s she was in a relationship with the Indian novelist, Salman Rushdie,[22] to whom she was introduced by their mutual friend, Bruce Chatwin.