"Tracks: One Woman's Journey Across 1,700 Miles of Australian Outback"

[fiefoe]

Robyn Davidson took more than half of the book to recount her preparation for the trip, and her brutal honesty is on full display.

• help build the telegraph system and railways that would eventually cause their economic demise. When this happened, the Afghans had let their camels go, heartbroken, and tried to find other work.
• there was nothing but the dry red parchment of the dead heart, God’s majestic hidey-hole, where men are men and women are an afterthought.
• They are haughty, ethnocentric, clearly believing that they are god’s chosen race. But they are also cowards and their aristocratic demeanour hides delicate hearts. I was hooked.
• while I held their hands across the counter saying there there, they pissed silently and unselfconsciously up against the bar.
• Aussie male is still so sentimentally clung to. The modern-day manifestation is almost totally devoid of charm. He is biased, bigoted, boring and, above all, brutal.
• A compliment bled from the master was worth a million given freely by anyone else. There have been many happy slaves.
• the middle-class delusion that everyone was a good guy at heart if you could just get to the bottom of their problem
• I was shy and confused with my own kind and did not trust them. I did not understand the change, did not realize that I had become isolated, defensive and humourless, did not know that I was lonely.
• how to use ropes to tie up a camel, how to carve and whittle nose-pegs from white-wood or mulga, how to splice, how to fix saddles, in fact all the myriad little bits of knowledge that would play such an important part in my survival out in the bush.
• It’s important that we leave each other and the comfort of it, and circle away, even though it’s hard sometimes, so that we can come back and swap information about what we’ve learnt even if what we do changes us and we risk not recognizing each other when we return.
• the self-indulgent negativity which was so much the malaise of my generation, my sex and my class.
• And it struck me then that the most difficult thing had been the decision to act, the rest had been merely tenacity — and the fears were paper tigers. One really could act to change and control one’s life; and the procedure, the process, was its own reward.
• sunlight exploded, flooding everything with its harsh pounding energy; crickets grated intermittently from the flowering pomegranates and made, together with the drone of the blow-flies in the kitchen, an anthem for hot Australian afternoons.
• a policy which appears on the surface to be antithetical to apartheid but which, on closer inspection, produces identical effects. That is, a policy which ensures that Aboriginal lands go once again into the hands of the whites (in this case multinationals), that a cheap labour source is made available by removing all trace of black ethics and culture
• Poor destitute me, who was saving up at the rate of fifty cents a week to buy things like boxes of rivets and screwdrivers and leather and knives
• It gave me a superficial identity, or structure, which I could crawl into when I was down, and wear like a dress
• He then took out an enormous syringe with a needle on it the size of a drinking straw, handed it to me and made me stand two feet away from Kate’s neck and throw the needle at her like a dart.
• Camels always lose weight during training. Instead of eating, they spend all day thinking about what you are going to do to them.
• I discovered that the peg had indeed splintered along the shaft, and was opening the wound as it turned. I had to make another peg and insert it through that tortured flesh. How animals ever forgive us for what we do to them, I will never understand.
• I was even practical enough to sharpen up my knives so that I could take her beautiful coat and tan
• My brother-in-law heard about this and, to my complete bewilderment, rang Kurt and offered to buy the place for me.
• Once again I was tied to the ranch and beginning to believe that this process of trying to wheedle camels out of non-cooperative people was never-ending.