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

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes depictions of emotional and verbal abuse, gender discrimination, and animal cruelty.

Robyn Davidson is the author of Tracks. As Tracks is Davidson’s memoir, she writes the text from her first-person point of view. She uses an intimate, open tone that invites the reader into her internal experience of the events she describes. Instead of simply presenting the more heroic, courageous aspects of her desert trek, Davidson pairs these aspects of her physical journey with the more vulnerable facets of her internal journey. Davidson presents an honest rendering of a distinct era of her life by marrying her exciting discoveries with her psychological challenges on the page.

Davidson represents herself as an introspective and determined individual. Although she claims in the postscript that she is “no longer the person who made that decision” to walk through the desert, she asserts that she still has “an affinity with her [and] occasionally even feel[s] proud of her” (264). In the memoir (written two years after she completed the trip), she attempts to inhabit this former iteration of herself, giving her life and spirit credence on the page.