44
" The thing that impressed me most was that Eddie should have been bitter and he was not. He had used the incident for his own entertainment and mine. Whether he also used it for my edification I do not know. But I thought about this old man then. And his people. Thought about how they’d been slaughtered, almost wiped out, forced to live on settlements that were more like concentration camps, then poked, prodded, measured and taped, had photos of their sacred business printed in colour in heavy academic anthropological texts, had their sacred secret objects stolen and taken to museums, had their potency and integrity drained from them at every opportunity, had been reviled and misunderstood by almost every white in the country, and then finally left to rot with their cheap booze and our diseases and their deaths, and I looked at this marvellous old half-blind codger laughing his socks off as if he had never experienced any of it, never been the butt of a cruel ignorant bigoted contempt, never had a worry in his life, and I thought, OK old man, if you can, me too. "
― Robyn Davidson , Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback
49
" I remember one story, which I have never had verified, but which rings true, concerning a myth belonging to some tribe in Western Australia. In the beginning, the women had everything. They had the power to procreate, they supported the tribe and kept them alive with their knowledge of bush foods, and they had a natural superiority. The also had the 'knowledge' which they kept hidden in a secret cave. The men conspired to steal this knowledge, so that things would be more balanced. (Now here comes the crunch.) The women heard of this, and instead of stopping them, realized that this was the way things had to go, for the sexes to remain in harmony. They allowed the men to steal this 'knowledge' which has remained in their hands until today. "
― Robyn Davidson , Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback
57
" He was very bright, with a brain twice the size and weight of a pumpkin. I found him attractive and at the same time he frightened me. I was jealous of his IQ and the way in which he could use the traditionally masculine language of the political intelligentsia to win any argument, and to produce an impenetrable aura of dominance and power around him. He saw any entry into the morbid internal landscape as the realm of the female. He saw it as counter-productive. Of course, then I understood — anything that smacked of mental struggle, any confession of weakness that might be termed ‘indulgence’ was bourgeois, reactionary, anti-political. Maybe this was why (and I had seen this so often, and marvelled at it, puzzled over it) many politically oriented men — that is, rational, clever, articulate, intellectual, competent, dedicated, revolutionary, verbally aggressive men — found it so difficult to face, or come to terms with, or admit, their own sexism. Because it involved the painful self-indulgence of turning inward, of recognizing in oneself the enemy. "
― Robyn Davidson , Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback