Tracks (31 page)

Certainly I was intensely tuned to my environment, aware of the interconnections of things — that net, or web, of which we are a part. Travelling with an old Aboriginal man, Mr Eddie, set me up for that change, and I hope it was not presumptuous of me to imagine that the new state of mind might be something similar to the way traditional Aboriginal people related to place. It is one of history’s ironies that such profound knowledge is becoming rare just as the rest of the world begins to understand its value. European Australia has existed for only two hundred years, but in that time tremendous damage has been done to our country.

The desert systems, pristine to the untrained eye, have been flogged by cattle and whacked out of kilter by introduced species. Waves of extinctions have occurred, and that process is speeding up. I experienced this myself and wrote about it: of travelling through the Gibson desert area during a drought, but finding that it was rich with life, with plenty of tucker for my animals. Then, a month later, reaching the first pastoral fence to find the real desert beginning — a dust bowl full of dead or dying bullocks, and no ground cover except poisonous turpentine bush. That boundary fence marked the most depressing transition in the whole journey.

But I could not know that in just thirty years the landscape I knew so well would be refashioned to such an extent that I would find it difficult and painful to return there.

Up on the sandhills, where I would sometimes sit to watch a sunset, there would be the delicate little scrawls of tracks in the sand, made by lizards, marsupial mice, particular insects. There would be the drag marks of perenties, the pretty scallops of a snake, the long indentations of roos, the triple prongs of emus. In the evenings those silly curious birds would come into my camp, dingos would howl close by, there would be the thump of wallabies all night and the rustle and hop of little native creatures. Now, many of those animals are rare or gone. Their tracks are replaced by camel pads and pussycat tracks and fox prints and rabbit holes. Wherever you look, these new patterns and marks spread over the earth like mycelial webs. In other areas, dark green buffle grass introduced from Africa has taken over, suffocating everything beneath it, and changing the unique palette of the Australian interior.

Sometimes I find these changes so upsetting that I never want to go to the desert again. Other times I think that the homesickness is for an experience that could in any case never be repeated, and for people and ways of thought whose rightful place is the past. This desert belongs to another ‘now’ and it’s foolish to compare them.

As that young woman in
Tracks
so wisely said, ‘Camel trips do not begin or end, they merely change form.’

Robyn Davidson, June 2012

© 2013 All photos by Rick Smolan/Against All Odds Productions

My father (left) and Sallay making a traditional pack saddle
© 2013 All photos by Rick Smolan/Against All Odds Productions

© 2013 All photos by Rick Smolan/Against All Odds Productions

© 2013 All photos by Rick Smolan/Against All Odds Productions

© 2013 All photos by Rick Smolan/Against All Odds Productions

I
SHOULD LIKE TO
thank my friend, Rick Smolan, for the photographs in this edition. I would also like to thank Janine Roberts for allowing me to use the research and several quotes from her book
From Massacres to Mining.

Robyn Davidson was born on a cattle property in Queensland, Australia. She went to Sydney in the late sixties, then spent time studying in Brisbane before moving to Alice Springs, where the events of this book begin. Since then, she has traveled extensively, living in London, New York, and India. In the early 1990s, she migrated with and wrote about nomads in northwestern India. She is now based in Melbourne, but spends several months a year in the Indian Himalayas.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

Copyright © 1982, 2012 by Robyn Davidson

© 2013 All photographs by Rick Smolan/Against All Odds Production

Cover design by Andrea C. Uva

978-1-4804-5267-1

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com