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In 1977 Robyn Davidson walked out of Alice Springs with four camels and her dog, Diggity, and kept going for about nine months and 2,700 kilometres, until she reached the Indian Ocean on the coast of Western Australia. She had spent two years in Alice Springs learning to train wild camels first. National Geographic paid for the trip in return for an article and photographs by Rick Smolan, and the book she wrote afterwards, Tracks (1980), won the first Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and has been in print ever since. Davidson, born in Queensland in 1950, went on to travel with nomadic herders in India and to write about nomads, home and restlessness. This guide covers her 7 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 key books · 1980–2023 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Robyn Davidson has published seven books of her own. The best known is Tracks (1980), about her 1977 camel trek across Western Australia; the others include the novel Ancestors (1989), Desert Places (1996), about the Rabari nomads of India, and the memoir Unfinished Woman (2023). Start with Tracks: everything she wrote later looks back to it.
Where to Start with Robyn Davidson
If you want her defining book
→ Tracks (1980) — the 1977 camel trek.
If you want the story behind the trek
→ Unfinished Woman (2023) — the memoir she published more than forty years later.
If you want another desert, another culture
→ Desert Places (1996) — with the Rabari herders of India.
If you want the trek in pictures
→ From Alice to Ocean (1992) — Rick Smolan’s photographs.
7 Robyn Davidson Books, in Order
Tracks
In 1977 Davidson set out from Alice Springs with four camels and her dog Diggity and walked about 2,700 kilometres west to the Indian Ocean, a journey of around nine months. The book covers the two years she spent learning to handle camels, the stretch she walked with the Aboriginal guide Mr Eddie, and her uneasy deal with National Geographic, which sent the photographer Rick Smolan to meet her along the route. It won the inaugural Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and was filmed in 2013 with Mia Wasikowska.
Travelling Light
Her first collection of essays and shorter pieces, published in Australia by Collins in 1989 and reissued in 1993.
Ancestors
Her only novel. Lucy McTavish, an orphan, is sent to live with an eccentric great-aunt in the outback in the 1960s and moves on through a smart girls’ school, a Sydney commune, an avant-garde circus and a relationship with a gangster known as the Boss. The story is framed by her hallucinated journeys back to the Australia of her ancestors. Publishers Weekly found it energetic but uneven.
From Alice to Ocean
The 1977 trek told in Rick Smolan’s photographs, with Davidson’s text. It was published with an early interactive CD.
Desert Places
Davidson travels with the Rabari, sheep- and camel-herding nomads of northwest India, on one of their last great seasonal migrations, drawing on time she spent with them between 1990 and 1992. She questions her own right to be there and does not speak her hosts’ language. Kirkus praised her frank admiration for the Rabari’s endurance and found her funniest when she mocks her own position as an outsider.
No Fixed Address
A book-length essay published as Quarterly Essay 24, about nomadic peoples around the world, the pressures pushing them to settle, and what their disappearance means. It was reissued in 2015 as a short book.
Unfinished Woman
Her first book in more than twenty years opens with her mother’s suicide when Davidson was eleven. It moves, out of chronological order, through her Queensland childhood, Sydney in the late 1960s, London, where Doris Lessing lent her a place to live, a relationship with Salman Rushdie, and her years with nomads in India. It explains much of what Tracks left unsaid about why she walked into the desert.
In What Order to Read Robyn Davidson
None of Davidson’s books continue from one another, but Tracks is the one to read first: From Alice to Ocean revisits the same journey in pictures, and Unfinished Woman goes back over the life that led to it.
After that, Desert Places and No Fixed Address make a pair: the first is the experience of living with nomads in India, the second the argument she drew from it. Ancestors, her only novel, is for readers who already know her nonfiction; its heroine’s path echoes Davidson’s own early life.
A reading path
1. Tracks (1980)
2. Unfinished Woman (2023)
3. Desert Places (1996)
4. No Fixed Address (2006)
Everything Else Robyn Davidson Published
Beyond the 7 key books: 2 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Co-written and edited
2
2 books · 1987–2001
- 1987Australia: Beyond the Dreamtimewith Thomas Keneally and Patsy Adam-Smith
- 2001The Picador Book of Journeysan anthology of travel writing, as editor
The years · 1950–2023
Quick facts about Robyn Davidson
- Known for
- A solo camel trek across the Western Australian desert in 1977 and the book about it, Tracks.
- 1950
- Born near Miles, Queensland
- 1977
- Walks from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean
- 1980
- Tracks
- 1996
- Desert Places
- 2013
- Tracks filmed with Mia Wasikowska
- 2023
- Unfinished Woman
- Born
- 6 September 1950, Stanley Park, a cattle station near Miles, Queensland
- The trek
- 1977, about 2,700 km over nine months, with four camels and a dog
- Breakthrough
- Tracks (1980), inaugural Thomas Cook Travel Book Award
- Screen
- Wrote the ABC film Mail Order Bride (1987); Tracks filmed in 2013
- Has lived
- Sydney, London, India and Castlemaine, Victoria
- Honours
- Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM), 2024
The red mark is 1980: Tracks, the book about her 1977 walk across the desert.
How Robyn Davidson Writes: The Reluctant Adventurer
Davidson writes against the heroic version of her own story. In Tracks she calls the whole plan “the lunatic idea”, and admits she sold “a great swatch of my freedom” to National Geographic for the money to do it. The camels are wild animals she has had to learn to handle, not props, and the attention the trip attracted becomes part of the story.
Her subject is always the gap between the life of a settled society and the life of people who move. She writes about the desert as abundant rather than empty, about Aboriginal people and later the Rabari of India as experts in a way of life she is only borrowing, and she keeps asking whether she has any right to be there. Desert Places and No Fixed Address turn that question into an argument about nomads and the modern state.
Unfinished Woman, written more than forty years after Tracks, is deliberately broken up: passages from different years overlap, and the book starts with her mother’s death rather than the walk. If you want writers with the same mix of hard travel and self-scrutiny, see Authors like Robyn Davidson.
Watch
Robyn Davidson on Tracks, 1981
An audio interview recorded by the journalist Larry Katz in June 1981, when Tracks was new, preserved in Northeastern University Library’s Katz Tapes archive.
Frequently asked questions about Robyn Davidson’s books
How many books has Robyn Davidson written?
Seven books of her own, all on this page: Tracks (1980), Travelling Light (1989), Ancestors (1989), From Alice to Ocean (1992, with Rick Smolan), Desert Places (1996), No Fixed Address (2006) and Unfinished Woman (2023). She also co-wrote Australia: Beyond the Dreamtime (1987) and edited The Picador Book of Journeys (2001).
What are Robyn Davidson’s books in order?
Tracks (1980), Travelling Light (1989), Ancestors (1989), From Alice to Ocean (1992), Desert Places (1996), No Fixed Address (2006) and Unfinished Woman (2023).
Where should I start with Robyn Davidson?
Tracks (1980). It is her defining book, and her later work keeps returning to it. Read Unfinished Woman next if you want to know what drove her into the desert.
What is Robyn Davidson’s most famous book?
Tracks (1980), her account of walking about 2,700 kilometres from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean in 1977. It won the inaugural Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and has been translated into more than 20 languages.
How long did Robyn Davidson’s desert trek take?
About nine months in 1977, covering roughly 2,700 kilometres (1,700 miles) from Alice Springs to the coast of Western Australia, with four camels, Dookie, Bub, Zeleika and Goliath, and her dog Diggity. Before setting out she spent two years in Alice Springs learning to train camels.
Is Tracks a film?
Yes. Tracks (2013), directed by John Curran, stars Mia Wasikowska as Davidson and Adam Driver as Rick Smolan. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2013 and was released in cinemas in 2014.
Who was Rick Smolan?
The American photographer whom National Geographic sent to photograph the trek, as part of the deal that funded it. He met Davidson several times along the route, and the two later published his pictures as From Alice to Ocean (1992).
What is Unfinished Woman about?
It is Davidson’s 2023 memoir about the life around Tracks: her mother’s suicide when she was eleven, her Queensland childhood, Sydney in the late 1960s, London and Doris Lessing, a relationship with Salman Rushdie, and her years with nomads in India. It is written out of chronological order.
Has Robyn Davidson written fiction?
One novel, Ancestors (1989), about a young woman, Lucy McTavish, whose life runs from the outback to a Sydney commune and a circus. She also wrote the script for the ABC television film Mail Order Bride (1987).
Is Robyn Davidson still alive?
Yes. She was born on 6 September 1950 in Queensland, published Unfinished Woman in 2023 and received the Medal of the Order of Australia in 2024.
Footnotes
- Robyn Davidson — Wikipedia
- Desert Places — Kirkus Reviews
- Ancestors — Publishers Weekly
- Ms Camel — London Review of Books
- Changeling warrior — The Conversation
- Interview with Robyn Davidson — The Katz Tapes, Northeastern University Library
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“Contrary to popular belief, the desert is bountiful and teeming with life in good years.”
— Robyn Davidson, Tracks (1980)
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