Richard Cooke - On Robyn Davidson

Published in partnership with

Published by Black Inc.

in association with the University of Melbourne and State Library Victoria.

Black Inc., an imprint of Schwartz Books Pty Ltd

Level 1, 221 Drummond Street, Carlton VIC 3053, Australia

www.blackincbooks.com

State Library Victoria

328 Swanston Street, Melbourne Victoria 3000 Australia

www.slv.vic.gov.au

The University of Melbourne

Parkville Victoria 3010 Australia

www.unimelb.edu.au

Copyright Richard Cooke 2020

Richard Cooke asserts his right to be known as the author of this work.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

9781760642303 (hardback)

9781743821329 (ebook)

Cover design by Peter Long and Akiko Chan

Photograph of Richard Cooke: Loulou

Photograph of Robyn Davidson: Kym Smith / Newspix

Text design by Peter Long

Typesetting by Akiko Chan

To my grandfather

, ,

A few hundred years hence, in this same place, another traveller, as despairing as myself, will mourn the disappearance of what I might have seen, but failed to see.

Claude Lvi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques

SETTING OUT

M aatsuyker Island, a sea-worn islet off the southernmost coast of Tasmania, is among the most remote places in Australia. It is inhospitable permanent gales sometimes raise surrounding waves to a twenty-metre swell but not uninhabited. It has a lighthouse, still operated by volunteer lightkeepers who sign on for a season of isolation. They spend it maintaining the mechanism, flying kites and noting down rare clouds for the Bureau of Meteorology.

Esther Nunn was the lightkeeper on Maatsukyer Island when she first encountered Robyn Davidson. A friend sent her Tracks (1980), which arrived via helicopter, and on its cover was a photo of the author, atop a camel, in front of Uluru. I want to do that, was the lightkeepers first thought.

Esther Nunn spent her thirtieth birthday on the desert sand of the Gunbarrel Highway in the Northern Territory, naked and leading a file of camels. It was 2010, and she was 101 days into a tribute trek to mark the thirtieth anniversary of Tracks publication. That book became my bible, Nunn told me, and her copy she still has the chopper-delivered original is full of underlining and asterisks. As she made a version of Davidsons passage from Alice Springs to the Coral Coast in Western Australia, she compared the places described in the book to the places she was seeing, and tried to visualise how the country had changed. After 162 days, she reached the waters of Shark Bay. She wanted to keep her camels, and so, in time, walked back across the desert to Alice Springs. This round trip took the best part of three years.

Calling a book or an author life-changing doesnt say much: all literature is life-changing, if the increment of alteration is mundane enough. But the capacity to reach out to a far-flung ocean rock, population one, and turn that lone reader into a cameleer and desert pilgrim what would you call that? Esther Nunn calls it life-defining, and her experience, while pronounced, is not unique.

Anna Kriens lifelong attachment to Robyn Davidson began the same way: with a photo. I remember being in a pizza shop when I was a kid, seven or eight maybe, Krien told me, and the National Geographic with her on the cover was there, and I swiped it. She felt important. And my hunch was right. Her desire to just be alone when she went into the desert resonated with me. Davidson has since become a moral compass for Krien in her writing, though she thinks she lacks the same bravery.

A similar image of Robyn Davidson was the accidental starting point of this essay. This time, the woman entranced was my wife, Loulou. We had travelled to Alice Springs because of Bruce Chatwin (a symmetry Bruce Chatwin had travelled to Alice Springs because of Robyn Davidson), and there, in Red Kangaroo Books, we chanced on a collection of Rick Smolans photography, Inside Tracks. Lou, who grew up in China, had never heard of Davidson or her work. She knew only that the figure on the cover, waist-deep in water and holding a camel against a backdrop of sea and sky, was the most beautiful woman she had ever seen. (This was also the description of Davidson that Smolan used in interviews.) So we bought it, and we bought Tracks as well.

I watched as the power of this book and its author, their energy and weight, worked an entrainment across cultures and generations. I have never, or havent for a long, long time, felt that kind of connection with anyone, in any material, or in any medium, Lou told me later. Its hard to explain, but I am drawn to that solitude, or freedom in disguise as solitude. It was a variation of the same sensation Krien and Nunn experienced, where Robyn Davidson became an avatar for their sense of freedom.

She managed what I couldnt, what most couldnt, was how Lou summed it up. And you cant just assume its some kind of recklessness. I dont think about her culture and mine when I read Tracks. Its just a human thing. Its even rawer than that.

Other writers, no matter their calibre, held no immunity against this effect. Doris Lessing received countless fan letters, but when a young Robyn Davidson wrote to her in 1977, Lessing responded. First, the future Nobel Prize winner encouraged the writing of Tracks, then suggested Davidson move to the United Kingdom, and finally put her up in the basement flat of the Lessing home while the book was edited. Bruce Chatwin spent years trying to articulate a homespun theory of what he called human wanderlust, and had already compiled a busy manuscript titled The Nomadic Alternative, which his publisher had rejected. After he met Davidson, and they talked over their shared interest in nomadism, Chatwin travelled to Alice Springs and met three of Davidsons friends: Jenny Green, Toly Sawenko and Petronella Waifer. Under assumed identities, they became the central characters of Chatwins refreshed book about nomadism, The Songlines.

In return, Chatwin introduced Davidson to Salman Rushdie, and the two had a volcanic relationship. In his 2012 memoir Joseph Anton (named for the pseudonym he assumed in hiding, post-fatwa), Rushdie describes how years earlier, on a plane home from Sydney, his emotions running high after his first few overwhelming days with Robyn, he took out a black notebook and began making notes for a novel about migration, the disjointednesses of here and there, then and now, reality and dreams. The novel would become The Satanic Verses. Its character Alleluia Cone is based on Davidson she is reimagined as a mountaineer and is perhaps the sole person in the book who has genuine access to the transcendent:

Allie kept to herself the knowledge that she must placate the mountain or die, that in spite of the flat feet which made any serious mountaineering out of the question she was still infected by Everest, and that in her heart of hearts she kept hidden an impossible scheme, the fatal vision the solo ascent.