Robyn Davidson

Robyn Davidson arrived in the outback town of Alice Springs in 1975 with almost no money and a vague plan to cross the Australian desert to the sea using camels, animals she had never handled before and had to learn to work with from local trainers who were often exploitative or dismissive of a young woman attempting the trip. She spent nearly two years working unpaid or badly paid jobs around camels simply to learn the skills the crossing would require.

In 1977 she finally set out from Alice Springs with four camels she had trained herself and her dog, heading roughly seventeen hundred miles west across some of the most remote desert country in Australia toward the Indian Ocean. National Geographic funding, arranged partway through, meant a photographer periodically joined her route, but the bulk of the nine-month journey was solitary, involving genuine risks from heat, water shortages, and once a violent encounter with a bull camel that could easily have killed her.

Along the way she spent extended time with Aboriginal communities and individuals who taught her about reading and surviving the desert landscape in ways her camel training alone had not covered, experiences she wrote about with more self-doubt and complexity than triumphant adventure narratives usually allow, including her own discomfort with the media attention the National Geographic sponsorship eventually brought.

Her 1980 book Tracks became a bestseller and was later adapted into a film. She has continued writing and travelling since, including extended time in India, but the desert crossing remains the journey she is best known for, valued as much for its honesty about doubt and difficulty as for the distance covered.