I love the desert and its incomparable sense of space.
— Robyn Davidson
Australia's arid western region, from the town of Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean coast, is a beautiful, haunting, but largely empty land. Dominated by the harsh, almost uninhabited Great Sandy and Gibson deserts, the region is known only to Australian Aborigines, a handful of white settlers, and the few travelers who motor across it.
Thank God for being a writer, because you do sort of find out what you think by the process of writing.
Much of the time I'm an introvert, by choice spending a lot of time on my own. I suppose liking my solitude is part of a writer's sensibility.
Camels are wonderful animals. Witty, intelligent and sensitive.
If you think of all the enduring stories in the world, they're of journeys. Whether it's 'Don Quixote' or 'Ulysses,' there's always this sense of a quest - of a person going away to be tested, and coming back.
These days I am ruled by doubt, and that is a difficult place to write from.
The agricultural revolution transformed the earth and changed the fate of humanity. It produced an entirely new mode of subsistence, which remains the foundation of the global economy to this day.
People who wander are nicer to be with. Movement militates against hoarding possessions and against bigotry, because you are constantly moving across boundaries and having to negotiate with people.
I've chosen difficult men. But then I'm sure they'd say they'd chosen a difficult woman.
As we've lost this idea of pilgrimage, we've lost this idea of human beings walking for a very, very long time. It does change you.
There are worse things than being called 'the camel lady,' I suppose.
My own memories are packed tightly away. I very rarely bring them out for viewing.
London sort of wore me down. I can't cope with the winters!
I'm not one of those true writers who can't bear not to be writing. Yet it's one of the most important things in my life.
It is always interesting being on films sets - I have done it before with other actor friends - and I just find it fascinating. I just love that collaborative film family that develops around a project.
I try to factor solitude into my life because more and more, that's becoming a very precious and rare commodity.
Camels are still trained in Alice Springs for tourist jaunts and for occasional sale to Australia's zoos.
I think people are frightened by different things, so I don't see myself as particularly courageous.
The idea of finding things out, I hope that will stay with me until I drop.
Some of the best conversations I've had are sitting around a camp fire.
Some instinct - and I think it was a correct one - led me to do something difficult enough to give my life meaning.
My thoughts can sometimes be spurred by what I read, but my reading is extremely eclectic.
When 'Tracks' first came out, I was courted by Sydney Pollack. I had lunch with him, and he opened the conversation with, 'Honey, you ain't gonna like what I'm gonna do to your book.' I really liked him, but I turned him down, because - well, I was stupid. I also turned down a great deal of money.
I do not mean to say that we should, or could, return to traditional nomadic economies. I do mean to say that there are systems of knowledge and grand poetical schemata derived from the mobile life that it would be foolish to disregard or underrate. And mad to destroy.
When I was young, I thought I wouldn't be a good mother. Now I think I would be, but I'm too long in the tooth.
Never, never have a famous partner. It's too complicated.
By taking to the road, we free ourselves of baggage, both physical and psychological. We walk back to our original condition, to our best selves.
That arrogance of youth and that kind of ignorant confidence can get you through a whole lot of things, and then life does its stuff, and you get smashed around and beaten up. You get full of doubts, and you end up making a person out of those bits and pieces.
After thirty years of being 'the camel lady,' believe me: One becomes inured to the spotlight.
Life's the adventure. You don't have to drop your bundle and go bush. It's about being brave within the context that you're in.
The romantic view would be that nomads are wonderful people, better than us; they care about the environment.
I am very lucky: not very many writers can say they genuinely like the film of their book. However, I do.
You really can expand the boundaries of your life and do risky things and prove yourself by doing them.
At the age of 25, I gave up my study of Japanese language and culture at university in Brisbane and moved to the town of Alice Springs.
The French word for wanderlust or wandering is 'errance.' The etymology is the same as 'error.' So to wander is to make mistakes. In other words, to make mistakes, to make errors is sort of the idea of learning through trial and error, allowing the mistakes to be part of the process.
You have to remember that I was an Australian girl of the Fifties and Sixties. For Australians at that time, it was imperative to get out of the country and discover the world.
The desert is natural; when you are out there, you can get in tune with your environment, something you lose when you live in the city.
My sense of myself is that I was a rather unformed kind of person trying to make myself up out of bits of spit and string.
The truth is I'm not really interested in travel writing as it's generally conceived, and even less so in female travel writing.
In 10000 BC, all human beings were hunter-gatherers; by 1500 AD, 1 percent were hunter-gatherers. Less than .001 percent of people are hunter-gatherers today.
During these last ten thousand years, we have made massive, unprecedented changes to the environment, creating problems for ourselves that we may not be able to solve.
I don't want to be bored; I don't want to be with someone I don't respect.
Of course, in India, I always said, 'Oh yes, I'm married.'
In every religion I can think of, there exists some variation on the theme of abandoning the settled life and walking one's way to godliness. The Hindu sadhu, the pilgrims of Compostela walking past their sins, the circumambulators of the Buddhist kora, the haj.
Think for yourself. Act for yourself. Find out what you're capable of.
If you are fragmented and uncertain, it is terrifying to find the boundaries of yourself melt.
I'd always loved writing, in the same way that I'd loved painting. I wouldn't have seen it as a career.
As you get older, you do just get tired.
You can trick yourself into doing things by doing it one step at a time and never letting yourself see the overall picture.
