Robyn Davidson’s new book starts with a punch to the stomach that leaves you winded. The celebrated Australian traveller and writer takes us back to her 11-year-old self. Her mother, Gwen, doesn’t want her to wear gold sandals to school. Young Robyn has never disobeyed her before, but this time she does. As she leaves the kitchen, her mother says: “Aren’t you even going to kiss me goodbye?” Robyn heads off for school, triumphant in her gold sandals. When she returns later that day, her mother has killed herself.
What she tells me when we talk on a video call is equally shocking in its own way. “From the day she died, I didn’t think about her once. She was never mentioned in the family.” Her book, Unfinished Woman, presents itself as an investigation into her mother’s life and death – a biography of sorts. But, really, it is an autobiography, from a narrator who stresses her unreliability and unwillingness to even write it. She says that memory is selective, revisionist, mendacious even, or simply fades to nought. Take the story of the sandals. When we talk, Davidson admits that she is pretty sure Gwen’s death didn’t directly follow her act of rebellion. She probably died weeks, even months, later, but in her head the two events are umbilically linked.
Unfinished Woman, a title that applies as much to Davidson as her mother, has been a tortuous quarter-century in the making. It’s a companion piece to the book that made her famous. Tracks, which was published in 1980 (and made into a film in 2013, starring Mia Wasikowska and Adam Driver), tells the story of her audacious solo walk across 1,700 miles (2,735km) of Australian desert with her dog Diggity for company and four camels to carry her gear.
It is a trip that few experienced travellers would consider taking. Davidson, then 27 (she is now 73), was not an experienced traveller. It’s an astonishing tale about pursuing a crazy dream; a paean to nature and the Indigenous people she met en route; a celebration of sand, solitariness and the liberated hippy spirit. All that’s missing is motive. We don’t know why she was so determined to make the nine-month trek across the desert. Which is where Unfinished Woman comes in. Put the two books together, and it becomes apparent that the journey and her mother’s death were intimately connected, though not in a simple or explicable way. At the start of Unfinished Woman, Davidson’s father emerges as the main figure in her life – a larger-than-life Boys’ Own hero who had fought in wars, seen the world, and appeared to know the answers to the big questions. Her mother, meanwhile, was tiny in every sense – “four foot eleven, thin as a harebell, with shoulders like a perched bird,” Davidson writes. Home was a cattle station in Queensland, where Gwen was rendered invisible. She couldn’t compete with the stories of derring-do told by her husband. Gwen loved the arts and was a gifted pianist (as is Davidson, who turned down a music scholarship as a teenager), but that made little impression on her daughter. Gwen’s life was one of drudgery and benign submission.
After her death, it was as if she had never existed. Friends were not invited to the funeral in case they discovered she had taken her own life. Suicide was shameful, cowardly, a criminal act and a sin against God. Her name was blackened.
Her mother’s voice returned to Davidson in her mid-40s, around the age at which Gwen had taken her life, insisting she had not been given a fair hearing. Ever since, Davidson has not been able to stop thinking about her. “If I’d lived in another century, I’d have felt I was haunted. It was as if she had come back and said: ‘I have been misjudged, I have been spoken about wrongly. It’s your job to fix that. You’re the only one who can do that, so get on with the job.’” Had she played a part in erasing her? “I was absolutely complicit. I’d buried the past under cement in order to survive.”
Davidson became profoundly depressed after her mother’s suicide, but she never connected the two things. “I was desperately lonely, unhappy and lost.” She remembers one particular occasion when she was 12. “I was out on the golf course behind the house, and suddenly the world disappeared as a world. It was nothing but this utterly loveless, meaningless, purposeless storm of energies that we are trapped in and can never understand. And we are in hell. I think everything I’ve done since then has been an effort to knit the world back together from that vision, to refute nihilism. So in that sense my mother’s death changed me because I’m sure that insight wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t killed herself.”
By the age of 16, she had moved to Sydney and was living independently, sometimes on the streets, working as a croupier and artist’s model among other things. I tell her that I imagine an incredibly super-confident girl. She laughs, and says she was anything but. Her childhood had left her with an overwhelming sense of inadequacy. “My sense of myself was that I was weak, incompetent, unable to succeed in everything. So the preparation for the journey in particular and the journey itself was a self-proving, and it worked.”
Crossing the desert started out as a fantasy, but she approached it with a scientific precision that astonished her. “I find it really difficult to be methodical. I am a total dreamy, forgetful, all-over-the-shop sort of person. I had to work very hard against my tendencies.” Davidson arrived in Alice Springs, the gateway to the desert, with six dollars. She then spent two years planning how to cross the desert and survive it – rehearsing routes, working out timings, learning how to track, shoot and skin animals, and training her camels.
“You can’t be lazy with camels,” she says. Why not? “They’re very big animals. If you make a mistake you can be very dead, very quickly. So you have to be alert all the time.” Had she always been good with animals? “I think so. I get animals. There’s an instinctive understanding of how they work.” Humans, she says, are more troublesome. “We’re a tricky species because language allows us to be much more cunning. Without language, it’s a very frank, straightforward relationship.”
She had hoped to do the journey entirely by herself. But as the time neared for departure, she still didn’t have sufficient money for the equipment she needed. She met a young photographer, Rick Smolan, who suggested that she should sell her story to National Geographic to subsidise the trip. The magazine offered her a whopping $4,000. It was agreed that Smolan would occasionally meet her in the desert to take photos.
Davidson still believes the deal compromised her integrity. “I had nothing but contempt for National Geographic. It was the last word in conservative schlock, so I felt I’d sold out and it meant involving Rick. I thought initially: ‘He’ll be there at the beginning and the end, so I’ll hardly ever see him, and he’ll just take a few snaps and it won’t really matter.’ But of course it hugely mattered. It changed the whole complexion of the thing. What I realised at the end was that instead of being the subject of this journey I was now an object. The trip didn’t belong to me any more.”
She and Smolan briefly became lovers. Davidson, who doesn’t mince her words, is rather dismissive of the experience. “Look, he was adorable, and he was just trying to do his job, but to me he was a total terminal dick and I didn’t want him there.” As for the sex, she is even more dismissive. “It seems an awful thing to say but it was simply a way of releasing the tension. I was so angry with him being there; he was in love with me, it was so tedious. Poor Rick!” They ended up great friends, and remain so today. “You can’t do something like that with someone like that without murdering them in a dune or loving them.”
Davidson likes the film of Tracks, but not the straight line it draws between her trek and her mother’s death. “It feels so deterministic – a mother kills herself, so 20 years on a girl crosses the desert trying to work something out. And it’s just not like that. There were a million reasons why I made that journey. It wasn’t just one thing leads on to the other. Life’s not like that.”
For starters, Davidson says, she was young in the late 60s and 70s, when anything seemed possible. “Everything was about freedom and risk and testing and pushing and seeing who you were and who you could be and refusing to accept the restrictions of the time and the past. It was a heady and wonderful time to be young.” She thinks the film suggests that a young woman had to be unstable rather than adventurous to undertake such a challenge. “They made Mia, that darling actress who is still a dear friend, too troubled and grumpy. There’s not enough jokes in the film. Not enough pleasure, I suppose.” Despite her bleakness, she does have a huge sense of fun.
The film focuses on the pain – we see the sun tearing the skin off her back, Davidson exhausted to the point of insanity, half dead with dehydration. All this happened, she says, but there was so much more. “That journey was joyous – it made a person of me, it strengthened me. There wasn’t anything in that environment I couldn’t cope with. I was a terrific tracker. I was superb, if I say so myself, with those animals, and they with me – they gave back, they’re wonderful animals. And the exquisiteness of that landscape – the variability of it! It’s beautiful beyond description. So being immersed in that landscape – sleeping on it, eating it when you get sand in your food, shitting on it, and walking every day on it, you enter a rhythm that’s not like any other rhythm. I hate the word ‘spiritual’ but your consciousness changes in relation to the environment. Your consciousness gets bigger and bigger.” For the first time, she says, she felt at home in the world.
Did she always think she’d survive the crossing? She shakes her head. Before the trip she was warned that if she was approached by bull camels she must shoot first and think later. “All they want is a female camel and they will do anything to get it, including killing you.” One day three bulls approached. “I shot two dead and only wounded the third, who ran off and would have had a very slow and miserable death.” How did you feel that night? “Pretty bloody awful but you just do what you have to do.”
Also a water crisis near Uluru (then known as Ayers Rock) early on in her trip. “I was low on water and there was a well marked on the map, so I headed for the well but it was dry. My stomach rolled over and I thought: ‘If the next well’s dry, we are fucked.’ It was a 10-day walk to the next well and my camels were thirsty. I was shitting myself. Ten days walking on your own, not knowing if you’re going to live or die. I remember thinking how embarrassing it would be – such a stupid death.” Thankfully, the next well was not dry.
After nine months she completed her 1,700-mile journey across the desert by reaching the Indian Ocean. By now the “camel lady” was a cause célèlebre. Her private trip to prove herself ended with her being surrounded by photographers from around the globe. She wrote her piece for National Geographic, then a longer piece appeared in the Sunday Times magazine, and finally came the bestselling book Tracks. She was now renowned for having escaped the rat race. It didn’t make sense to her.
I tell her I recently interviewed Tom Turcich, a man who spent seven years walking the world, and that he was finding it hard to adapt back to the “real” world. “Tell me about it!” she says. “I think I never have actually adapted. What you come back to will always seem a bit mad. I think we are mad. I think humans are bonkers. When you have that different sense of what your relationship to reality is and you come back to this insane place, you never forget.”
In Unfinished Woman, Davidson writes about life after the desert. She lived in India for years with a Rajasthani prince. She trekked with camels once again in India, but it wasn’t the same. “They were covered in beautiful apparel. Riding them was like riding a silk cloud, but they were mean and they didn’t like me and I didn’t like them.” They lacked the wit and kindness of her four camels in the desert, she says. There was life in literary London. When Doris Lessing saw the “horrible” place Davidson was living in, she invited her to live in a self-contained flat at the bottom of her house, from where she finished Tracks. There was a two-year coup de foudre with Salman Rushdie that ended disastrously. There have been more books, more journeys, more nomadic searching for belonging, for purpose, for her mother. And there was another horrific depression that almost did for her in the late 1990s and early 00s.
As she writes about it, you fear that the conclusion she has reached is that her mother was the brave one; that it’s cowardly not to kill yourself. I tell her how much I worried for her. “It was a hell I wouldn’t wish on anyone, but even at the worst of it, it often felt it didn’t quite belong to me. There was a part of me, maybe the writer part, that was looking on. I never believed I would kill myself. I knew I could bear it. I could carry it.” Does writing about the unbearableness of life make life more bearable? “Maybe. I hadn’t thought of it that way. But life is unbearable. What we do to one another is unbearable.”
What next? She says one thing is certain – she will never write about herself again, and she will be glad when she never has to talk about the book again and can get on with living. She has settled in a house she adores just outside Melbourne. “It was a stone dump and it’s now a rather beautiful stone dump. I wanted enough guest rooms for friends to stay, I wanted to make a garden, I wanted good coffee within five minutes, and I wanted to be able to see kangaroos within one minute. And I got it all.”
After her protracted quest to recover her mother, what has she discovered about her? “That she was funny and clever and loving, and how much she and I actually liked each other.” As for herself, understanding will always be a work in progress. But she does now realise how wrong she was about the young woman she’d written off as incompetent and cowed. “I look back at her and think, how the fuck did you do that and where did you get that chutzpah from?”
Unfinished Woman by Robyn Davidson (Bloomsbury, £18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Unfinished Woman by Robyn Davidson (Bloomsbury, £18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
