Published by Bloomsbury, 1980, 262 pages

I’ve often wondered what it would be like to strip myself of all the expectations that society has of me and pit myself against the elements. Who am I really, under all those layers? In 1977, Robyn Davidson set out to answer this question, walking 1,700 miles across the Australian desert with four camels (the fourth was a surprise—she didn’t know the female camel, Zeleika, was pregnant) and Diggity, her beloved dog. At the time, Davidson was living in Sydney and knew nothing about either camels or long treks.

Davidson began her journey at Alice Springs, staying there for a year to learn to handle camels. Women’s lib had certainly not reached Alice Springs, “where men were men and women were an afterthought”. Her first trainer was a crazy tyrant who taught her well but drove her to the limit of her endurance and sanity.

National Geographic approached her, offering to pay for her story. But this meant that photographer Rick Smolen would meet her at various points during her trek. She hesitated: this was supposed to be a journey of self-discovery with no strings attached, but she needed the money. So she accepted, and the expedition began.

Davidson writes beautifully, especially when she is describing the desert.  She sits near Ayers Rock, watching the “gathering evening changing the bold harsh daylight colors to luminous pastels, then deeper to the blues and purples of peacock feathers”. She develops a growing sensibility to the landscape around her until she could, just by looking at the tracks of a beetle, identify the beetle and know where it was going and why. This book taught me a lot about camels—they’re sensitive and intelligent and funny, not the bad-tempered creatures I’ve always thought they were. The animals in Tracks have characters as distinctive as any of the humans: Zelly, the female, is the sensible one who knows which desert plants are edible. Dookie is the dignified one, “the camel born to be king” and Bubby, the youngest, is the practical joker. And of course, there’s Davidson’s beloved dog, Diggity—irrepressible, loyal, and incredibly patient.

Davidson meets a lot of Aborigines on her journey—they take her in and she learns a great deal from them. An aborigine elder, Eddie, walks with her for two days. “He was sheer pleasure to be with, exuding all those qualities typical of old Aboriginal people — strength, warmth, self-possession, wit, and a kind of rootedness, a substantiality that immediately commanded respect.”

The end of Davidson’s journey was nothing like its beginning. By then, she had become famous and, to her dismay, was being pursued by paparazzi. Rick Smolan came in handy: he knew how to talk to journalists and managed to help Davidson steal back some of her privacy.

And we have him to thank for the lovely pictures in the book. My favorite is the last one, in which a camel stands on a beach, gazing at the sea. To me, it represents freedom, complete liberation from expectations, which is what this journey was about.

This review first appeared on Women on the Road.