Robyn Davidson explores yet another foreign country – the past

Robyn Davidson never set out to become a writer. ‘It did not form my identity,’ she tells us early on in her memoir Unfinished Woman. ‘In my own mind I had simply pulled another rabbit out of a hat. As I had done all my life with everything.’ The rabbit, in this case, is the ability to capture an exciting and complex life with insight and humour.

Born in 1950 on a cattle station in Queensland, Australia, Davidson was the second daughter of a handsome war hero from a privileged background. Home was a place full of ‘dust and wide verandas, comfortable old chairs and good horses, though never adequate cash’. Her mother, Gwen, a lover of the arts, was ‘ground down by country life and yearned to return to the city and all that it represented… Loneliness engulfed her’, Davidson tells us. ‘There was so little relief from it except music and I suppose, to some extent, her children.’ The family moved from the cattle station to an ‘outer, outer suburb of Brisbane, to be “closer to doctors”’. It was in this house that Gwen tragically unravelled: ‘My mother hanged herself from the rafters of our garage, using the cord of our electric kettle.’ Davidson was 11 when this seismic rupture occurred.

While still a teenager, she left Brisbane for Sydney, where she slept rough until she found an abandoned cottage to squat in. She foraged for food, eking out an existence on a bare bed frame, reading books by candlelight. Then there was a job as a poker dealer in an underground gambling den. The gangster owner of the club, a married man in his forties, became her lover. When she decided to leave the underworld, she was sexually assaulted at knifepoint.