ENGL2045 TRAVEL WRITING (Week 9)
Robyn Davidson’s Tracks (1980)
Tracks is usually read less as a study of nature than a story of feminist self-assertion
through nature and against men. The quest for self-discovery initially shows little
enthusiasm for western nature romanticism, and prefers the alternative way of seeing
nature through nomadic experience. This gives the book both environmentalist and postcolonial themes. In particular, it registers post-colonial guilt regarding the treatment of
the Aboriginal people of Australia.
The big question is whether, in trying to see through Aboriginal eyes, and to get back to a
primitive idea of nature, she is able to escape the history of western approaches to nature.
In other words, are so would-be direct encounters with the aboriginal wilderness
mediated through western models of nature – especially romanticism, and the idea of
modern touristic escape from urban life.
The principle site of nature Davidson enters is the desert, where she encounters a version
of the sublime, typical of western travel writing: “Bright green peeked out of the valleys
and chasms, and all of it capped with that infinite dome of cobalt blue. The sense of space,
clean bright limitless space was with me again.” (165) She enters this space as a western
observer, accompanied by Eddie, an aborigine whose relationship with nature is radically
different from hers. Davidson assumes and seeks to emulate Eddie’s vision of nature, yet
he is not a romantic hero. He is a descendant of the “dream-time heroes”, whose tracks
across the desert are ingrained in the landscape through their mental maps. (171)
For Eddie, “limitless space” is not an abstract concept, but one element in the interfusing
of the spiritual, the material and the self in nature. He avoids the modern division of
nature into the primitive (wilderness), the utilitarian (farms, mines etc.) and the
recreational (parks) or representational (gardens, aesthetic images). So for Eddie, nature
is already “one”, and he is at one with it. This existential feeling of belonging to the
environment is doubly lost on white Australians who are both interlopers here, and
culturally conditioned to stand apart from a “nature” made abstract through analysis by
the disembodied gaze.
Davidson attempts to cross-over, to see the desert as Eddie does and through this to
challenge dominant western views, and encourage emerging western ideas of
environmentalism and the good works of those now attempting to assist surviving
aborigines, whose role as spiritual guardians of a disappearing first nature is at last
(probably too late) being valued. But Davidson’s quest for self-discovery is only
temporarily hitched to this aboriginal attachment; she can never gain Eddie’s immediate
contact with nature and, as her quest for self-discovery takes over, she comes to regard
the desert figuratively as the dramatic, psychic and sometimes aesthetic space of her
journey, not the material space it is for Eddie.
In intuiting Eddie’s attachment to the land, she is already detached, idealising and
polemical, because she rather uses him (and the desert and the poor animals who suffer
and die) to find herself, and temporally distance herself from western civilisation.
Although it does bring some acknowledgement of the plight of Eddie and his kinfolk, is
this largely escapist – i.e. about Davidson, not Eddie?
Examples:
In comparing western and aboriginal approaches to health care, Davidson admits that “it
was impossible for me to leap outside the limitations imposed on my culture’s description
of what is possible”, (177) the same might be said of her attempts to think herself outside
western concepts of nature and time. She claims that she “relaxed into Eddie’s time” as
he taught her about “flow … about enjoying the present.” (178) But as with
Matthiessen’s attempts to escape a western concept of linearity, this is a thought
experiment more than experiential reality. She is soon back to worrying about schedules
and maps, obsessed with her own survival and sanity, which mostly seem to depend on
resisting the desert.
She is occasionally forced to communicate with tourists en route: “ After two weeks with
Eddie I was a different person … and had entered a different world – a parallel universe. I
was finding swapping realities from Aboriginal to European quite difficult.” (185) This
change is described later as suddenly learning to see in nature, the deep patterns and
connections, rather than “pretty visual designs with a few associations attached”, (195) in
other word’s the picturesque.
From “seeing” connections between insects, rocks and the universe, she leaps to a
romantic concept of self-dissolution – no longer afraid to let the “boundaries of [her]self
melt”, she too “became lost in the net and the boundaries of [her]self stretched out for
ever.” (196) She goes on to explain how her subconscious then took over and this was
how she survived – by linking up with “Aboriginal reality, their vision of the world”.
(196) Should we be sceptical of this transformation? Does she escape the confines of her
own culture’s ideas of western romanticism and existentialism to see nature as Eddie sees
it.
In her letters, she shows a different version of events. Here she seems entirely at odds
with the inhospitable nature of the desert and desperate, even after a few weeks, to return
to civilisation.
TUTORIAL QUESTIONS (1.4.2011)
1. Look for examples of conflict between western and aboriginal ways of seeing nature –
what are the main differences?
2. Does Davidson show that it is possible, perhaps only temporarily, to escape the
thinking and ways of seeing we have learnt?
3. As a feminist traveller, what specific criticisms does she make of western maledominated society?
4. Does she use gender relations in Aboriginal society to focus attention on western
values?
Paul Smethurst, March 18, 2010