Just how remarkable an achievement is the account contained in Tracks: A Woman’s Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback? Well, put it this way, it is very likely that it could not be replicated today, at least not exactly in the same way. The age of cell phones, satellite internet access, global positioning and even digital photo manipulation would put too great a potentially suspicious damper over the veracity of a bare-bones journey such as that described the author.
Tracks is not just a journey across the desert of Australia. It is a journey into the world of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s and it is only when one delves into a historical account of that supposedly revolutionary era that it becomes just how far removed the social construction of the time is from the millennium. The 1960’s was the most turbulent decade across the geographical stretch of the planet and the sociological expanse of the industrialized world that had been witnesses for at least a century or more. The patriarchal order was being challenged just as surely as civil rights movements were slowly inching toward a more equitable view of people regardless of the pigment of skin. Even so, just a few minutes skimming through the text of Tracks illustrates how the world of 1970 still had so much more in common with the world of 1950 than with the world of 2020. In retrospect, books like Tracks can be a real eye-opener for those who insisted that truly significant advances in gender equality had already been attained by the time the 1960’s ended.
Davidson’s solo trek across the topographical landscape of Australia is placed into the context of her journey through the misogynistic patriarchal order and its associated wing of abject racism. White men rule the world and any achievement accomplished by a woman or any person of color is magnified precisely on account of such biases. That Davidson managed to do what she did was a remarkable achievement for anyone, but it was made all the more tangibly extraordinary because she was a woman alone. (For the most part; in fact, her entire journey was far from being entirely solo.)
That level of accomplishment could not be ceded to any woman making the journey today. Expectations are higher for what women can and should be expected to accomplishment. In addition, if done today, one can well imagine that instead of a book written years afterward, the entire journey would be live-streamed on the internet with commercial backing in exchange for product sponsorship. The humps of her beloved camels would be draped in logos of corporate interests. Every “chapter” of her YouTube video novel would be preceded by a reminder that it was being sponsored buy the energy drink she turns to whenever she’s got another fifty miles go.
Tracks is not a story of a spectacle designed to transform an unknown into a celebrity. It is specifically a story of isolation and alienation, of a trek across the desert of the mind as well as the desert of the Outback. Davidson did not even begin with the idea of making the journey as the subject for a future book. The trek itself was the point and the whole point. It was only once the journey began that it also became insight into systemic patriarchy, misogyny, racism and commercial sellouts. It is a story impossible to imagine recreating in exactly the same way ever again.
