The Politics of Camels
The female Zeleika and the male Dookie are two of the camels which the author trains to accompany her on her trek across the desert. At one point she turns to political metaphor to draw in stark lines the difference between the two and like any good and proper citizen of the Commonwealth, her metaphor references the relationship of the aristocrat to the politician:
“She was the Prime Minister, while Dookie was nominally king, but if anything untoward happened he was the first to hide behind her skirts.”
The Photographer
The author unexpectedly receives backing from National Geographic for her trek with the catch that a photographer must accompany her at times to snap a photo journal for publication. This causes friction as the imagery of her odyssey as portrayed in the pictures seem to bear little relationship to the reality of her situation:
“Never let it be said that the camera does not lie. It lies like a pig in mud.”
Racism
One of the subplots of the story is the author’s introduction to the deep-seated strain of racial prejudice toward Australia’s indigenous Aboriginal people on the part of the white population who regularly come into contact with them in the outback. The racism is no mere abstraction, but comes into play as an active agent which impacts the larger narrative of Davidson’s preparations for her treacherous journey:
“I had planned to camp in the creek with the Aborigines until I could find a job and a place to stay, but the harbingers of doom on the train had told me it was suicide to do such a thing.”
The Nazi (Metaphorically Speaking)
The author has trouble at first finding anyone in Alice Springs willing to train her in the art of training camels. She is forced to make an exchange of becoming an apprentice for a short period in exchange for getting a camel with a man of Germanic name and nature who subjects her to such torture that she quits several times. The relationship is rocky to say the least:
“Kurt was stupefied. He had sized me up wrongly, and pushed a sucker too far. The dollar signs faded from his eyes.”
“The Camel Lady”
The most insidious and despised—and recurring—metaphor in the book is the reference to the author as “the camel lady.” Even though she does at least enjoy the distinction of elevation to lady instead of the potential alternatives—camel girl, camel chick, camel Sheila or even something significantly more vulgar—it is still viewed by the author in derogatory terms due to its almost immediately dismissive connotation.
Aboriginal Studies 101
Plunging right into the deepest waters of racist dismissal of Aborigines does more than merely create a thematic reference point for the author. It is from the point of learning the extent of a kind of racism she’d never really encountered before that a sub-narrative unfolds in which Davidson wants to understand more about the indigenous culture as she also comes to view herself as an outsider among white society. But anthropological sociology is not something one easily masters while one is at the same time trying to learn how to train camels:
“Apart from the fact that I am no authority on the subject, trying to describe Aboriginal cosmology briefly is like trying to explain quantum mechanics in five seconds.”
