CAMEL LADY
“…Ms Robyn Davidson…”
Dear Sir, … Do you know The Camel Lady?”
-Stephen Fitzpatrick, Dublin, Ireland.
*REPLY: Does anyone?
I presume you are referring to that excellent self-promoter, Ms Robyn Davidson, author of a subsidised book about her orchestrated “journey” through the Central Australian desert between Alice Springs and the Shark Bay coast of West Australia.
Unbeknown to most, she was not the first traveller to walk camels across our outback deserts. Before her highly-publicised venture was launched, Dennis Wickham (see his story elsewhere on this site) walked his camels from the eastern coast to the western coast twice before Ms Davidson elected to repeat only half of his journey.
Utilising the media quite skillfully, the lady deftly cultivated an aura of the alluring mystery woman and her camels surviving in the Central Australian wilderness – not quite true, some say, for she was accompanied for most of the trip by an old Aboriginal man, and it was suspected by some cynics in the media she also carried a two-way radio in her packs to maintain regular contact with her American sponsors, a well-known U.S. magazine with an international circulation.
And so another myth was born in a land that has cultivated many.
The so-called “Camel Lady” continues to the present day, after 30-odd years, to cleverly capitalise on a contrived reputation that is not based entirely on truth or fact.
One time in the 1980s I was knocking around Hamelin Pool Station over on the West Australian coastline. Driving along a bush track, we came across some camels blocking our way and I asked the owner-manager if they were feral animals.
He replied: “Nah, they are Robyn Davidson’s bloody camels. She bushed them here after she finished her trip, and they’ve been here ever since.”
Winking, he added: “I think she’s lost interest in them.”*
Commenting is closed for this article.
