Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback

Davidson’s Tracks is a memoir that blends elements of various genres. Written in 1980 and detailing Davidson’s adventures through the Australian outback in the late 1970s, the text straddles the genre divides between memoir, feminist literature, and nature writing. Davidson uses her personal experience in the desert to promote female empowerment, explore how travel can change the individual, and comment on the transformative power of communing with the natural world. The malleability of Davidson’s text is in part what has made Tracks such a timeless work of nonfiction and a notable piece of social activism.

The text satisfies the traditional parameters of the memoir genre, in that it details a discrete era of Davidson’s life. Unlike autobiography (which traces the entire scope of the author’s life), memoirs seek “to recreate [an event or series of events] through storytelling.” Memoirs also don’t hold the author to factual constraints the way autobiographies do. Instead, memoir writing gives the author “more flexibility [to tell] a story as she remembers it, not as others can prove or disprove it” (Dukes, Jessica. “What Is a Memoir?” Celadon Books). These aspects of the genre are reflected in Tracks.