Robyn Davidson won immediate acclaim for her first book, Tracks (1980), which, like the best travel books, deals not only with the place its author visited but also with the difficulties she experienced while attempting to understand what she was doing and why. Tracks is as much about what it is to be a woman in Australia during the 1960s and 1970s as it is about the practical details of traveling by camel through central and western Australia. In fact, these two aspects of the book interact: as Davidson self-consciously questions her “unwomanly” activity, it becomes apparent that travel is experienced in terms of how one sees oneself as a man or woman.

Robyn Davidson was born on 6 September 1950 to Australian parents, Antil Guilford Davidson (known as Mark) and Margaret Harris Davidson, in the small town of Miles, two hundred miles west of Brisbane in the state of Queensland...