Robyn Davidson
The author and first-person narrator is Robyn Davidson who at the age of twenty-six arrives at a life-changing decision: she is going to travel solo across the central desert of the Australian outback. She arrives in Alice Springs with a dog, a suitcase full of inappropriate clothing and six dollars. She is untrained, unprepared and know very little about the undertaking she is committed to fulfilling. She will spend two years in Alice Springs preparing for the actual journey which itself takes about nine months. Over the course of that time pretty much everything she had thought the trip would be like changes drastically.
Kurt
Leaving very little room for any serious argument, Kurt is the most fascinating, complex, maddening and mysterious character in the story. An immigrant from Vienna who speaks in a thick Germanic accent and displays all the characteristics of likely having been quite eager to brown-colored shirts had he lived in an earlier era, he is nevertheless instrumental in preparing Davidson to the point that she could actually survive her planned trek. He is roughly equal parts teacher and torturer to Davidson and it is practically impossible to imagine this story ever being told without his presence.
Rick
On the other hand, it is quite easy to imagine how the story would have turned out differently had the author never a young photographer named Rick. Davidson would quite likely have found some way fulfill her plans, but the fundamental template of the story would have been altered substantially. Everything about the trip changes from the moment Rick enters the story and urges her to contact National Geographic about underwriting her financially in exchange for exclusive rights. Rick becomes the catalyst that ensures the dream journey takes place, but also the alchemist who transform its essential properties from one thing into another.
Diggity
The character who is the closest companion to the narrator is actually that dog who accompanies her to Alice Springs. Loyal little Diggity is ever-faithful to her owner, never making demands of which might serve to impede her plans and willing to go along for the ride wherever it leads. Diggity is also the central character in the most emotionally charged scene of the book; a scene that speaks profoundly not just to special relationship which exists between people and pets, but also to the effects of prolonged isolation and alienation from human contact.
Eddie
Eddie an Aboriginal elder who accompanies Davidson at one point for a roughly 200-mile-long leg of her trek. Eddie stands in stark contrast to most of the white Australians of Alice Springs who are, for the most part, portrayed as brutish, drunken, misogynistic racists. Eddie—who would have been the object of derision as something of inferior stock by those men—is respectful to his wife, happy in spirit, helpful, smart and open-minded. It is also notable that despite having been warned that the Aborigines were essentially rape-crazy when it comes to white women, Eddie never poses a sexual threat. This becomes an even starker point in consideration of what Davidson had been warned about back in Alice Springs: referring not to the Aborigines, but the white male population there, she was directly informed to be more careful because with her actions so far she was priming herself to become “the next rape case.” Within that context, it is easy to see why Eddie becomes second only to Diggity in the hierarchy of friends during the trek.
Zeleika, Kate, Dookie, Bub and Goliath
The camels that Davidson trains and takes on her journey are characters not just in the sense of being animals. The author endows each of them with specific individual personalities and the reader comes to recognize the actions of certain camels based on this anthropomorphizing.
