image of person or book cover 435329692149832314.jpg
This image has been sourced from online.
y separately published work icon Tracks single work   autobiography   travel  
Issue Details: First known date: 1980... 1980 Tracks
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

Robyn Davidson tells the story of her 1977 journey across the desert, from Alice Springs to Western Australia. She and a Pitjantjara elder completed their crossing on camel's back. Tracks is the story of her adventure, not only across the desert, but also into self-discovery, and the discovery of the beauty, nobility, and history of the country and its people. (Source: Trove)

Adaptations

form y separately published work icon Tracks Robyn Davidson , Marion Nelson , ( dir. John Curran ) Australia : See Saw Films , 2013 Z1910218 2013 single work film/TV (taught in 2 units) 'The inspirational true story of Robyn Davidson's solo camel trek through the harsh centre of Australia, aided only by her faithful canine companion Diggity and the National Geographic photographer who chronicled this epic modern adventure.' (Source: Screen Australia website)

Reading Australia

Reading Australia

This work has Reading Australia teaching resources.

Unit Suitable For

AC: Year 10 (NSW Stage 5)

Themes

Australia, freedom, journey, love, Maturation/identity, quest, spirituality, travel

General Capabilities

Critical and creative thinking, Literacy

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Jonathan Cape ,
      1980 .
      image of person or book cover 140494475473441344.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 256p.
      Description: illus., [8] leaves of plates
      ISBN: 9780224018616
    • New York (City), New York (State),
      c
      United States of America (USA),
      c
      Americas,
      :
      Pantheon Books ,
      1980 .
      image of person or book cover 435329692149832314.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 256p.
      Edition info: 1st American ed.
      Description: illus, [8] leaves of plates
      ISBN: 9780394514734
    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Bloomsbury ,
      2012 .
      image of person or book cover 3155578788658487304.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 261p.
      Description: illus, still images
      ISBN: 9781408834862 (pbk.)
    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Bloomsbury ,
      2017 .
      image of person or book cover 6127947256419407169.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 261p.p.
      Edition info: 40th anniversary edition
      ISBN: 9781408896204
Alternative title: Sporen in de woestijn
Language: Dutch
    • Amsterdam,
      c
      Netherlands,
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Meulenhoff ,
      1995 .
      Extent: 285p.
      Edition info: 1st Dutch ed.
      ISBN: 9029041447
    • Amsterdam,
      c
      Netherlands,
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Forum ,
      2003 .
      Extent: 285p.
      ISBN: 9022534324

Other Formats

  • Also braille, sound recording.
  • Also available as an eBook

Works about this Work

Making Tracks i "Her father walked across the African desert", Margaret Bradstock , 2022 single work poetry
— Appears in: Australian Poetry Journal , vol. 12 no. 1 2022; (p. 54)
Deep Water Lauren Burns , 2022 single work essay
— Appears in: Meanjin , September vol. 81 no. 3 2022; (p. 180-187)

'The cycle that drives Australia's unpredictable climate is called the El Nino Southern Oscillation, or ENSO for short. This essay originated in Black Summer-the climax of the last El Nino. The title was supposed to be ironic, but has become literal for those caught in the recent La Nina east coast floods. As the climate heats, ENSO's oscillations are becoming wilder.'  (Introduction)

Reluctant Wandering : New Mobilities in Contemporary Australian Travel Writing Kate Cantrell , 2020 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature 2020; (p. 353-364)

'Travel has always been an important trope of settler literature, central not only to colonial displacement and dispossession but to postcolonial reimaginings of identity, gender, and place. However, it was not until the early twentieth century, after the rise of literary nationalism, that a nativist form of travel writing emerged in Australia. By mid-century, there was a more established tradition due to the introduction of motor touring and a post-war boom in mass migration and tourism. In the 1970s and 1980s, Australian travel writing was chiefly preoccupied with road stories, and with narratives of risk and adventure, while in the 1990s, Indigenous writers imagined new possibilities for healing through travel writing that sought to recover ancestral connections to language and land. Today, Australian travel writing is a burgeoning subject of academic enquiry, and in Australia, as elsewhere, there is a broadening rather than narrowing perspective of what constitutes ‘travel’ writing. Recently, an upsurgence of interest in mobility studies has raised new questions, not only about the experience of moving (and being moved), but about how different theories of im/mobility are central to the way travel is practised and prohibited, and sometimes undertaken reluctantly.'

Source: Abstract

y separately published work icon Packing Death in Australian Literature : Ecocides and Eco-Sides Iris Ralph , London : Routledge , 2020 19932417 2020 multi chapter work criticism

'Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecocides and Eco-Sides addresses Australian Literature from ecocritical, animal studies, plant studies, indigenous studies, and posthumanist critical perspectives. The book’s main purpose is twofold: to bring more sustained attention to environmental, vegetal, and animal rights issues, past and present, and to do that from within the discipline of literary studies. Literary studies in Australia continue to reflect disinterest or not enough interest in critical engagements with the subjects of Australia’s oldest extant environments and other beings beside humans.

'Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecocides and Eco-Sides foregrounds the vegetal and nonhuman animal populations and contours of Australian Literature. Critical studies relied on in Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecocides and Eco-Sides include books by Simon C. Estok, Bill Gammage, Timothy Morton, Bruce Pascoe, Val Plumwood, Kate Rigby, John Ryan, Wendy Wheeler, Cary Wolfe, and Robert Zeller. The selected literary texts include work by Merlinda Bobis, Eric Yoshiaki Dando, Nugi Garimara, Francesca Rendle-Short, Patrick White, and Evie Wyld.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

Lost and Found in Translation : Who Can Talk to Country? Kim Mahood , 2019 single work essay
— Appears in: Griffith Review , January no. 63 2019; (p. 29-46)

'Unlike many city-dwelling Australians, the desert holds no terrors for me. Instead, like DH Lawrence, I find the cathedral forests of the coastal regions oppressive and disquieting. Lawrence brought to his descriptions of the Australian bush the same overwrought sensitivity that created the claustrophobic emotional landscape of 'Sons and Lovers', and the appalling, majestic insularity of the Italian mountain village in 'The Lost Girl'. He was the writer who made explicit the sense of some non-human presence in the Antipodean landscape, and while I have a different interpretation of the 'speechless, aimless solitariness' he attributes to the country, his instincts were good.'  (Publication abstract)

 

Queen of the Desert Stephanie Bunbury , 2014 single work review
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 1-2 March 2014; (p. 8-9) The Canberra Times , 1 March 2014; (p. 20)

— Review of Tracks Robyn Davidson , 1980 single work autobiography
'A woman's trek across Australia inspired the world, but it took 40 years for the story to make it to the screen.'
Animal Affinity Angus Dalton , 2016 single work review
— Appears in: Good Reading , May 2016; (p. 18-21)

— Review of Horses Who Heal Sue Spence , 2016 single work autobiography ; Tracks Robyn Davidson , 1980 single work autobiography

'Dogs, cats, birds, horses, chimpanzees and even donkeys have played a huge role in the lives of many humans. Angus Dalton investigates memoirs that

celebrate the human–animal connection.'

Loosing and Following 'Tracks' in the Australian Desert Monica Turci , 2001 single work criticism
— Appears in: Travel Writing and the Female Imaginary 2001; (p. 109-118)
Return of the Nomad Rosemary Neill , 2005 single work biography
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 30 April-1 May 2005; (p. R6)
Making Places Out of Spaces: Reading the Spatial in Robyn Davidson's "Tracks" Clare Johnson , 2006 single work criticism
— Appears in: Sharing Spaces : Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Responses to Story, Country and Rights 2006; (p. 100-112)
Literature in the Arid Zone Tom Lynch , 2007 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Littoral Zone : Australian Contexts and Their Writers 2007; (p. 70-92)
This chapter surveys and assesses from an ecocentric perspective some representative literary portrayals of the Australian deserts. Generally, it contrasts works that portray the desert as an alien, hostile, and undifferentiated void with works that recognise and value the biological particularities of specific desert places. It explores the literature of three dominant cultural orientations to the deserts: pastoralism, mining, and traversal. It concludes with a consideration of several multi-voiced and/or multi-genred bioregionally informed works that suggests fruitful directions for more ecocentric literary approaches. (abstract taken from The Littoral Zone)
Cinematic Failures : Scene I, You've Seen Them All Robert Drewe , 2010 single work column
— Appears in: The Age , 22 May 2010; (p. 3)
Robert Drewe, hopeful that his book The Drowner will be adapted for film, recalls three previous failed attempts (each with director Ray Lawrence) to bring books to the screen. The titles in question were Drewe's stories 'Sweetlips' and 'Machete' and Robyn Davidson's autobiograpy Tracks.
Last amended 21 Jun 2018 11:16:07
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