Self-Discovery
This story begins as a self-admitted lunatic idea about a solo trek across the desert of the Australian outback by a woman with no experience and no idea of what preparations would entail. It was to be for private reasons only; a journey into the wilderness to make some sort of discovery about herself. What kind of discovery? Who knows, that’s the whole point. By the end, the author has learned many things about herself, but part of the discovery by then comes courtesy of the trek having been transformed into a story for worldwide public consumption.
Being an Outsider by Choice
When the author first arrives in Alice Springs, she is confronted with a level of intense racism directed toward Australia’s indigenous Aboriginal people such as she’s never seen up close before. Far too many essentially good people under such circumstances would simply try their best to ignore this ugly facet of humanity and avoid any situations which might worsen things altogether. Davidson’s reaction is to seek out representatives of this culture, communicate, understand and try to do her own small part to facilitate tolerance between the two cultures. Along the way, this process becomes an agency of self-discovery every bit as much as the actual trek into the desert. Gradually, the true state of her relationship to her own native white culture is revealed as having a strong connection to the Aboriginal state: like them, she is an outsider by her own choice, not in response to the negativity directed toward her in the form of deep-seated misogyny, gender expectations and sexual objectification.
How Media Tailors the Truth
One of the negative aspects of herself that the author discovers is a quicker than expected willingness to “sell out.” Although her decision to accept funding from National Geographic in exchange for exclusive rights to telling her story to the world only barely qualifies as a sell-out to any rational reader, the decision does affect her deeply enough that it is obviously still an itch that needs scratching even by the time she gets around to writing her own version of her own story. Likely that itch derives not so much from the actual transaction itself as from the results. Davidson learns the hard lesson of what happens when someone else is given the opportunity tell your story before you can do it yourself. The images for the magazine which Rick the photographer shoots present a reality not consistently with actual reality. By the time her journey concludes, the story has been framed from the outside to elevate her into a “feminist symbol” on the one hand and to dismissively undercut her achievement with the nickname “the camel lady” on the other.
