Robyn Davidson

SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE "I experienced that sinking feeling you get when you know you have conned yourself into doing something difficult and there's no going back." So begins Robyn Davidson's perilous journey across 1,700 miles of hostile Australian desert to the sea with only four camels and a dog for company. Enduring sweltering heat, fending off poisonous snakes and lecherous men, chasing her camels when they get skittish and nursing them when they are injured, Davidson emerges as an extraordinarily courageous heroine driven by a love of Australia's landscape, an empathy for its indigenous people, and a willingness to cast away the trappings of her former identity. Tracks is the compelling, candid story of her odyssey of discovery and transformation.

Tracks

una donna e quattro cammelli nel deserto australiano

Orme

Orme. Una donna, quattro cammelli e un cane nel deserto australiano

After many thousands of years, the nomads are disappearing, swept away by modernity. Robyn Davidson has spent a good part of her life with nomadic cultures – in Australia, north-west India, Tibet and the Indian Himalayas – and she herself calls three countries home. In this Quarterly Essay, she draws on her unique experience to delineate a vanishing way of life. In a time of environmental peril, Davidson argues that the nomadic way with nature offers valuable lessons. Cosmologies such as the Aboriginal Dreaming encode irreplaceable knowledge of the natural world, and nomadic cultures emphasise qualities of tolerance, adaptability and human interconnectedness. She also explores a notable paradox: that even as classical nomadism is disappearing, hypermobility has become the hallmark of modern life. For the privileged, there is an almost unrestricted freedom of movement and an ever-growing culture of transience and virtuality. No Fixed Address is a fascinating and moving essay, part lament, part evocation and part exhilarating speculative journey. ‘I watched him out of the corner of my eye. A man unused to sitting still, restless hands, darting eyes. Looking for water, feed, camping places, villages for food and medicine, thinking '... when will the cotton here be harvested, should we risk that jungle area ...' - calculating, observing, comparing, deducing, holding massive amounts of information in the head, juggling it around - the paradigm of human intelligence. This was what nomadism required - resilience, resourcefulness, versatility, flexibility.’ —Robyn Davidson, No Fixed Address ‘No Fixed Address is a fascinating and learned account of lives unknown to most of us ... remarkable.’ —Eric Rolls, author of A Million Wild Acres ‘It’s her clear-eyed no bullshit honesty that I most admire. Robyn Davidson is, without doubt, free. And being free is hard work.’ —Anna Krien, Dumbo Feather Robyn Davidson is an award-winning writer who has travelled and published widely. Her books include Tracks, Desert Places, Quarterly Essay 24: No Fixed Address – Nomads and the Fate of the Planet and, as editor, The Picador Book of Journeys. Her essays have appeared in Granta, the Monthly, the Bulletin, Griffith Review and in several previous editions of the Best Australian Essays, among others.

Nomads and the Fate of the Planet

Quarterly Essay 24 No Fixed Address

Thomas Keneally

Patsy Adam-Smith

Australia, Beyond the Dreamtime

This year's Best Australian Essays ranges far and wide. There are portraits of Michael Jackson, Samuel Beckett, the kookaburra, Julia Gillard and Charles Darwin. There are dazzling pieces on commerce and cricket, extinction and translation, perfume and politics. There are journeys through landscapes scorched and recovering, and reflections on turning points both public and deeply personal. For Robyn Davidson, the best essays 'put oneself and the world to the test.' Here is a collection of pieces that do just that - and also entertain, inspire and provoke.

Easyread Super Large 20pt Edition

The Best Australian Essays 2009

Easyread Super Large 24pt Edition

Easyread Super Large 18pt Edition

This anthology challenges what is defined as travel writing, as it is arranged as a journey, but not chronologically. It includes Flaubert in Egypt, Elizabeth David in the Mediterranean, and writers and discoverers such as Chekhov, Darwin, Doris Lessing, Tobias Wolff and V.S. Naipaul.

An Anthology

Journeys

Alice Springs

Robyn Davidson

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