National Geographic, Rick's Photos, and Ambivalence

I've anticipated this interview for 6 years. 

Robyn Davidson has lived one of the most mythologised lives in Australian memory.

She famously and unintentionally burst onto the scene with Tracks in 1988, which was a 2,700km camel trek across the Simpson desert. She'd never intended to write a book or document anything of it's kind from the journey, but was desperate for some money to gather supplies for the impending trip. She figured $1000 would do, and serendipitously met the National Geographic photographer who put her on the map whilst cleaning windows as a part time gig in Alice Springs. 

He said that if she wrote to National Geographic telling them about the journey, then she might get what she needed.

They paid her $4,000 which Robyn comments 'was a fortune', and from there, the rest is history.

Robyn has since lived between India, London and Australia but travelled most elsewhere on the map. She was with Salman Rushdie while he wrote the 'Satanic Verses', has published a series of books and articles documenting the lives of nomads, lived an 'aristocratic life' with her partner Narendra Singh Bhati in the high Himalayas and most recently published an autobiography titled 'Unfinished Woman'. Robyn say's to me that 'memoir is the slipperiest genre'.

I have waited 6 years to do this interview with Robyn. She has a dream guest of mine since before the podcast began. We recorded earlier this year in rural Victoria. 

The interview is Robyn's life. What led up to tracks, and what happened after. 

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