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Robyn Davidson | Tracks & Nomadism & Unfinished Woman
I’ve anticipated this interview for 6 years.
Robyn has been a ‘dream’ guest ever since I started this podcast. I wanted to do it in person, in Australia, and earlier this year, embarked on the long drive to Victoria to make it happen.
Robyn Davidson has lived one of the most mythologised lives in Australian memory. She unintentionally burst onto the scene with Tracks, a 2,700km camel trek across the Simpson desert, but then retreated from the literary fame and living between here and there lies a far deeper inquiry into truth, memory, and what it means to be free.
Robyn reflects on her lifelong resistance to labels. Not a “writer,” not a “traveller,” not a “feminist icon,” but simply, as she says, “a person.” We speak about memoir, the slipperiness of memory “in retrospect, memory is imagination”.
She speaks candidly about solitude, beauty, and depression, her family, fame, about the distortion of the famous photographs “Rick made me look like a Vogue model, that wasn’t me”, and her uneasy relationship with literary celebrity in London alongside Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis and more.
“Whenever you write in the first person, you are necessarily creating a character — a doppelgänger. She is me, but she’s not quite me.”“The truth is, memory is imagination.”“I worship the phrase ‘I don’t know.’ If you don’t have ‘I don’t know,’ you can’t learn anything.”“If you have a firm identity, you’re trapped in it.”
In this podcast you can expect the following discussion.
The Performed Self & Identity
- “Whenever you use the first-person pronoun, you are necessarily creating a character.”
The Narrative Fallacy
- “We invent neat, linear, emotionally satisfying stories to explain what happened… but the world is messy, chaotic and driven by chance.”
Freedom, Nomadism & Refusal to Be Fixed
- Freedom and movement — literal and intellectual — define her resistance to labels like “travel writer” or “author.”
Chance, Fate & Serendipity
- “On the tiniest turning point you can head off in a billion directions.”
Depression, Nihilism & Meaning
- “It’s a terrible pain that hovers somewhere between the physical body and the mental body.”
- “To learn how to deal with a profoundly nihilistic view and to counter that view — that’s been the most formative moment of my life.”
Beauty, Objectification & Subjecthood
- “If that journey was about anything, it was about being the subject of my own life, not an object.”
Feminism, Rebellion & the 1968 Generation
- The spirit of the late-’60s counterculture — radical freedom, equality, and experimentation — shaped her worldview.
Authenticity vs. Fame
- “What I was interested in was knowledge and whether people were genuine or not.”
Free Will, Doubt & the Human Condition
- “I worship the phrase ‘I don’t know.’ Because if you don’t have ‘I don’t know,’ you can’t learn anything.”
