ENGL6080 – Travel Writing and Culture
Notes for 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 post-colonial 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.
EXERCISES:
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 male-dominated society?
4. Does she use gender relations in Aboriginal society to focus attention on western values?
Paul Smethurst, Nov 2012