Topos of Journeying across Australian Outback : Re-reading Robyn Davidson's Tracks as a Master Narrative
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| Year of publication | 2015 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | In the presentation I propose to revisit Robyn Davidson's cult travel narrative Tracks (1980) and to reflect on the ways in which the account of this journey, popularly framed as a "1700-mile trek of a camel lady across Australian desert", contributed to setting up paradigmatic tropes for later narratives of women travelling to the Outback. Relating theories of gender and space, the tropes include journey as healing and spiritual re-birth; appropriating the space as feminine and outlining feminist cartography; engaging with (female) Indigeneity and confronting one's whiteness; conflation of autobiography/memoir and biography of a place. Indeed, the continuing popularity of Tracks, rekindled by a recent film adaption (2013), provides a frame to which later narratives can be linked: I will briefly refer to Craft for a Dry Lake (2000) by Kim Mahood and Body/Landscape Journals (1999) by Margaret Somerville – both hybrid memoirs of white women who travel to the Outback to articulate their embodied sense of landscape, displacement and (un)belonging. |
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