Robyn Davidson

Robyn Davidson (born 6 September 1950) is an Australian writer best known for her 1980 book Tracks, about her 2,700 km (1,700 miles) trek across the deserts of Western Australia using camels. Her career of travelling and writing about her travels has spanned 40 years. Her memoir is to be published in late 2023. Robyn Davidson was born at Stanley Park, a cattle station in Miles, Queensland, the second of two girls. When she was 11 years old, her mother took her own life, and she was raised largely by her unmarried aunt (her father's sister), Gillian, and attended a girls' boarding school in Brisbane. She received a music scholarship but did not take it up. In Brisbane, Davidson shared a house with biologists and studied zoology.

In 1968, aged 18, she went to Sydney and later lived a bohemian life in a Sydney Push household at Paddington, while working as a card-dealer at an illegal gambling house.In 1975, Davidson moved to Alice Springs, in an effort to work with camels for a desert trek she was planning. For two years, she trained camels and learned how to survive in the harsh desert. She was peripherally involved in the Aboriginal Land Rights movement.For some years in the 1980s she was in a relationship with the Indian novelist, Salman Rushdie, to whom she was introduced by their mutual friend, Bruce Chatwin.Davidson has moved frequently, and has had homes in Sydney, London, and India. As of 2014, she resides in Castlemaine, Victoria, Australia.