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Curious Worldview
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Curious Worldview
Robyn Davidson | Among Australia's Most Mythologised Lives... 'Memoir Is The Slipperiest Genre' - Unfinished Woman, Tracks & A Life Of Nomadism
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I've anticipated this interview for 6 years.
Robyn Davidson has lived one of the most mythologised lives in Australian memory.
She famously and unintentionally burst onto the scene with Tracks in 1988, which was a 2,700km camel trek across the Simpson desert. She'd never intended to write a book or document anything of it's kind from the journey, but was desperate for some money to gather supplies for the impending trip. She figured $1000 would do, and serendipitously met the National Geographic photographer who put her on the map whilst cleaning windows as a part time gig in Alice Springs.
He said that if she wrote to National Geographic telling them about the journey, then she might get what she needed.
They paid her $4,000 which Robyn comments 'was a fortune', and from there, the rest is history.
Robyn has since lived between India, London and Australia but travelled most elsewhere on the map. She was with Salman Rushdie while he wrote the 'Satanic Verses', has published a series of books and articles documenting the lives of nomads, lived an 'aristocratic life' with her partner Narendra Singh Bhati in the high Himalayas and most recently published an autobiography titled 'Unfinished Woman'. Robyn say's to me that 'memoir is the slipperiest genre'.
I have waited 6 years to do this interview with Robyn. She has a dream guest of mine since before the podcast began. We recorded earlier this year in rural Victoria.
The interview is Robyn's life. What led up to tracks, and what happened after.
Robyn reflects on her lifelong resistance to labels. Not a “writer,” not a “traveller,” not a “feminist icon,” but simply, as she says, “a person.” We speak about memoir, the slipperiness of memory “in retrospect, memory is imagination”.
She speaks candidly about solitude, beauty, and depression, her family, fame, about the distortion of the famous photographs “Rick made me look like a Vogue model, that wasn’t me”, and her uneasy relationship with literary celebrity in London alongside Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis and more.
“Whenever you write in the first person, you are necessarily creating a character — a doppelgänger. She is me, but she’s not quite me.”“The truth is, memory is imagination.”“I worship the phrase ‘I don’t know.’ If you don’t have ‘I don’t know,’ you can’t learn anything.”“If you have a firm identity, you’re trapped in it.”
In this podcast you can expect the following discussion.
The Performed Self & Identity
- “Whenever you use the first-person pronoun, you are necessarily creating a character.”
The Narrative Fallacy
- “We invent neat, linear, emotionally satisfying stories to explain what happened… but the world is messy, chaotic and driven by chance.”
Freedom, Nomadism & Refusal to Be Fixed
- Freedom and movement — literal and intellectual — define her resistance to labels like “travel writer” or “author.”
Chance, Fate & Serendipity
- “On the tiniest turning point you can head off in a billion directions.”
Depression, Nihilism & Meaning
- “It’s a terrible pain that hovers somewhere between the physical body and the mental body.”
- “To learn how to deal with a profoundly nihilistic view and to counter that view — that’s been the most formative moment of my life.”
Beauty, Objectification & Subjecthood
- “If that journey was about anything, it was about being the subject of my own life, not an object.”
Feminism, Rebellion & the 1968 Generation
- The spirit of the late-’60s counterculture — radical freedom, equality, and experimentation — shaped her worldview.
Authenticity vs. Fame
- “What I was interested in was knowledge and whether people were genuine or
Here I am today with Robin Davidson, somewhere in rural Victoria. Robin is, in my opinion, an amazing and totally engrossing writer. She's published several books. The main two, with which I'm familiar, is the aforementioned tracks, and her most recent biography titled Unfinished Woman. She's been awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia. Is that akin to a knighthood?
SPEAKER_00Gosh, I don't know what the equivalent is. I don't think so.
SPEAKER_04Our highest honour. As is a perennial theme in this podcast, Robin's ride to literary fame was unintentional and riddled with serendipity. She did not seek the subsequent fruits which that journey across the desert brought to market. To get some money, she wrote a piece to National Geographic. It took off perhaps unlike anything else they'd ever published. Robin was now on the scene as one of Australia's great writers. London, famous circles of people, publishers, movies, praise all became doors ajar to Robin. But she wasn't chasing that. Maybe even hated the new fame and the expectations. She just wanted to pursue her interests. Robin has an enduring fascination for nomadism. She's contributed a quarterly essay to the topic, many other articles, a book, and has walked the walk, spending years at a stretch with various nomadic communities across the world. She speaks very straightforwardly and sympathetically about depression, talks openly about suicide, and is as eclectically interested as anyone I could ever hope to meet. Robin is without a doubt, and please forgive for the brown nosing, but a dream guest of mine on this podcast. I once responded to a question in a grant application that the people I admired most were great adventures, great writers, and great journalists. In Robin Davidson, we have a pure expression of that combination. Anything else you want to add there?
SPEAKER_00No, that's so lovely, though. I feel a bit shy.
SPEAKER_04Well, it is my absolute pleasure to now play the interview for which we just recorded.
SPEAKER_00Thank you, Ryan. That's very sweet.
SPEAKER_04Just dive right into it. Do. You're worried about the narrative fallacy in writing the memoir. But do you think the same applies to doing an interview?
SPEAKER_00I think whenever you have to speak in a certain way, in a certain form, no matter how truthful you want to be, there is some process by which you are making a character of yourself. So there's a weird kind of doubling going on.
SPEAKER_04And you're worried about doing the Robin Davidson performance.
SPEAKER_00The Robin Davidson performance, exactly.
SPEAKER_04But what does that what does that mean?
SPEAKER_00Well, I I suppose I I see it more when I'm writing. It's much more clear then. Um that the Robin Davidson on the page is not the real Robin Davidson. And that doesn't mean there's any untruths or any lies or that it's not genuine. Um I take a lot of trouble to try to be, to try to get my ego out of the way. Um, but nevertheless, the process of writing is a creative process. Um you are emphasizing some some things, ignoring other things, creating structure. Uh, and all of that, particularly when you are a character in that work, well, you become a character.
SPEAKER_04Is it because it's all so elevated? You spend so much time constructing the perfect sentence, and it feels like that maybe isn't really who I am. This is the best possible version of myself, or is it something else?
SPEAKER_00No, it's something else. It's something else. I mean, I care deeply about making good sentences. You know, I care a lot about not writing shit, basically. Um, it's more to do with making a character on the page. And that character is a sort of doppelganger. She is me, but she's not quite me. Um it's quite disconcerting when you think about it. I think most writers don't think about it, but um, particularly in this memoir, um it was very important for me to be aware of that, and as I said before, to get my ego out of the way as much as possible.
SPEAKER_04And that's because the problem of memory, which you have spoken about. Like you're you're finding correlation between causation when in fact how can you even say so many is past the event whether they had anything to do with each other or not?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, indeed. Look, it's partly that, but I think it's more subtle than that. It's um some strange process. If you're a writer and if you're using the first person pronoun, you are necessarily creating a character. Um and how conscious you are of that is the sort of, I guess is the morality of the memoir. Um, and I do think it's an extremely slippery genre. In fact, I don't particularly like memoir. Um, but I felt compelled to write this one for all sorts of reasons, but also compelled to to take it very seriously in the sense of uh the responsibility of talking about other people, the responsibility of trying to get to the truth of the past, whatever the hell that is, um, and the responsibility of keeping that instinct to make yourself better than you are, which is what I mean by the ego, um, very present. So each time I'd sit down at the computer, it would be uh a real conscious effort to get that sort of stuff out of the way and really try to get to something I hate the word authentic, but that's kind of it.
SPEAKER_04Why do you hate the word authentic?
SPEAKER_00Oh, just because it's overused and it's not quite the right word either. It's something tr I suppose truth, to try and get at the truth, uh, you know, without ev without us even knowing uh what the truth is, but trying to get to the value of truth, I would say.
SPEAKER_04Because of the memory gap and the difference between your person and the other person's experience when recalling a memory. Precisely. You've only got one perspective there.
SPEAKER_00Precisely. And even that perspective is up for grabs, you know, because what I noticed was that um I'd go back to some memory and it would be as clear as a bell. Okay. Then maybe two months later, I would go back to that memory, and it wouldn't be it'd just be slightly different. You know, just slightly different.
SPEAKER_04Which calls into question. What was the first memory or the second memory the one to go off? Or is it the third and final?
SPEAKER_00Well, I think what happens is that in retrospect, you know, memory is imagination. It's not a a fixed, you know, it's not a fixed thing. It's mixed and merged with imagination necessarily. So that is what memory does. It um transforms and slightly alters and brings in a bit of this and leaves out a bit of that.
SPEAKER_04Did you ever see, or read rather, Ian McEwan's Atonement?
SPEAKER_00I haven't. I've got it, but I haven't read it.
SPEAKER_04Well, it's exactly this sort of theme. Right. Uh this event that takes place from three or four different characters' perspectives and each one's memory of it being different, with it having disastrous outcomes.
SPEAKER_00Of course. Well, there's a famous um Kurosawa film, Rushamon, which is it was exactly that premise. Um, and you know, you see the first bit of the film and you think you know exactly what's happened, and then the second bit of the film you see it from another spec perspective, and the first perspective's completely thrown aside, and then the third one, and so on. So you get a kind of composite of what might have actually happened.
SPEAKER_04Right. Which is the what do you call it, uh, the morally dubious or morally a better adjective after the morally, the problem of memoir by writing.
SPEAKER_00I think so. Um people think it's an easy genre, but I think it's the hardest genre. To make something of, to elevate it above just me, me, me, you know, look at me, look at me. Because uh in my case anyway, the uh I of the narrative, the personality of that uh person is just not at all interesting to me. The fate of that person is interesting, and it's the fate that I know best because it's mine. But uh the it wasn't written in the way I think a lot of memoirs are, which is sort of about the self. It wasn't really written about the self, it was written about this rather extraordinary fate.
SPEAKER_04And it is also uh kind of an unusual memoir because it isn't just a linear timeline of a series of events that in your extraordinary life have happened to you and you've experienced. Uh, it's kind of this is also a very cliche word to say kind of mythical or or spiritual or i it it it's grand descriptions of a place and then we'll move on 20 years down the timeline to another experience. And so in that way it's also maybe rather unusual. Is that your attempt to lift?
SPEAKER_00It was my n not an attempt to lift, but an attempt to write according to how I think the mind actually works and how memory is for me, certainly. We try to make this linear narrative, but the truth is, at least for me again, when I think of the past, I see it more geographically than temporally. Um I can sort of with a lot of effort try and make it fit into a timeline, but that doesn't come naturally at all. Um it's like spotlights on a on a dark field, and there's an enactment in that spotlight. And then next to it might be another enactment that happened ten years later, and then another one sort of over there that was when I was a child. Um so that's sort of how I see memory. And in writing the book, I tried to make the structure reflect that.
SPEAKER_04I've re-jiggered Nasim Taleb's definition of the narrative fallacy. Tell me if this fits with what you're thinking.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_04We invent neat, linear, emotionally satisfying stories to explain what happened. But the world is rather messy, chaotic, and driven by chance. The narrative fallacy makes us overlook randomness and uncertainty because we crave meaning and coherence.
SPEAKER_00That's it. Very well said, yes. Indeed. Indeed. Well, we have to make coherence out of it somehow.
SPEAKER_04Yes. And so is being complimented on your writing the highest form of praise you can receive.
SPEAKER_00Personally, or you mean for the books?
SPEAKER_04Personally.
SPEAKER_00No. Um I'm I'm very glad of it because, as I said before, I don't want to write crap. But you know, I I have no illusions about my vast talents. I don't I don't sort of care about that in a way. I want to make something as good as I can make it. Um I don't possibly I'm unusual in this way sense that I don't identify, you know, totally as a writer. And perhaps that's because of the strange way I came to it. But I feel that my identity is filled with all sorts of um characters.
SPEAKER_04This is a pretty sappy question, but like how would you then identify yourself if not as an author and a writer?
SPEAKER_00A person.
SPEAKER_04Just a person. Hence the sap in the world.
SPEAKER_00Well uh well, it's a very difficult question to answer without being flippant. Um, and when I say person, that is a flippant answer. Um obviously when I'm writing, I'm very deeply involved in it. And if someone asked me what I was then, I'd probably say, yes, I'm writing a book, and it's therefore I'm a writer, I suppose. But I don't quite feel comfortable saying I am a writer. What does that even mean? You know, I am a dog trainer, uh, I am a householder, I am a thousand million things. Obviously, writing's a very important part of that, but it is not my it's not how I encapsulate my identity my identity. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Uh and maybe in the in the with the theme of the book, this interview will also be very nonlinear.
SPEAKER_00Probably.
SPEAKER_04So we'll jump to say your 30s and 40s in the Himalayas. Yeah. There is, at least from my best attempt to make a timeline of your life, many years here without you publishing work and writing.
SPEAKER_00That's correct.
SPEAKER_04So what are you doing in this time of your life?
SPEAKER_00Again, it's quite hard for me to answer questions like that because I have to think linearly. Oh, what was I doing? Um well, I I think the easiest way to answer it would be that I, after tracks, which I thought would be a one-off thing, um suddenly it was assumed I was a writer, a born writer. And so I was sort of pressured into writing another book. Um it's okay, I sort of took that bait. Um I wrote a novel, rather bad novel. Um and then after that I was sort of at a loose end, not quite knowing what I wanted to do. And I decided then to do this project in India with nomads because it fitted into, I thought, um, this interest in how your publishable niche. Well, no, it actually wasn't that at all. Um, I was very resistant to writing another travel book in inverted commas because I didn't want to be labelled. It felt quite important for me to sort of sidestep all of that um fixing and labelling. Um but it it came about through chance that this opportunity arose to to uh do a project in India with these nomads and it fitted into something I was deeply interested in, which is how nomadism or how people move affects uh their culture how and how they think. Um so that's when I uh went to India and Desert Places came out of that. Again, after that well, I did the anthology and various small things, but I wasn't driven to write another book. Again, it comes to it comes around to this idea of if you have a firm identity, then you're sort of trapped in it. And I really didn't want that. Um if I was going to write another book, it'd have to be something I really wanted to do and had an importance for me, not just because I was a a writer who had to produce another book.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. Another commercial opportunity.
SPEAKER_00Yes, exactly. I've never cared about that.
SPEAKER_04The theme throughout Unfinished Woman is a lot of the road not taken, what ifs. And so because of um a letter, I think it was Doris something, you wrote her a letter. And she said, Well, if you can write a letter, you can write a book. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And then all of a sudden she said, if you can write a good letter, you can write a letter. Right, exactly.
SPEAKER_04I suppose there's an important distinction. Yeah. Yeah. Christopher Hitchens once said, uh, it's true that there is a book in every person, but in that person is where most of it should stay.
SPEAKER_00That's exactly quite right.
SPEAKER_04Um, but because you write this good letter and you're encouraged to write the book, and because of the enormous success of that National Geographic article that was written about you, no, but you wrote uh with Rick's photos, there was a you know, publishers knocking on your door, etc. Like the story had demand.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Um, but had you not had you just turned your your eye away from all of that? You know, do you have a sense for or at last or at least a romantic idea for how your life would have um God who knows gone after that?
SPEAKER_00Who knows? It could have gone in a billion directions. None of us understand that, you know, just on the tiniest, tiniest turning point, you can head off in a billion different directions. And also, my reasons for writing tracks were complicated. Um in fact, one of it was Doris who sort of talked me into doing the book, didn't talk me into it, but said that that's when she said, if you can write a good letter, you can write a good book. Um but more important for me was I thought, because I was so, sorry, I'm being a bit incoherent, because I was so um, because the sudden fame and attention was so unexpected, I mean totally out of the blue, I had no idea that was going to happen, because the journey had been a very private um something that I wanted to do just for itself. I had no intention of writing about it, nothing. It was just for me. And then all this brew ha ha happened. Um so I thought, in my innocence, if I write a book, the the sort of public world can have the book, and I will be left alone to get on with my life. And of course, what happened then? The book became a big bestseller. Um so every time I've sort of tried to step back from it, it's like fate takes over and makes a bigger brou-ha-ha.
SPEAKER_04It's funny you thought that because instinctually, maybe it's just through my own experience I would think this, but you know, I would attach so much romantic projection onto the author of that book. Who is the person who would do such a thing? It must be endlessly interesting and fascinating, and I want to know everything that they're doing from now until the end of time.
SPEAKER_00God help us.
SPEAKER_04Which is, I suppose, how it went.
SPEAKER_00Well, it had a strange effect, that book. And I'm still not sure quite. I mean, it's still it's never been out of print. I still have gorgeous young people coming up to me and saying, You change my life. Young people. Um there was something about that book that caught, it didn't just catch the Zeitgeist at the time, which indeed it did, but there was something more than that at the bottom of that book. I think it was some sort of it follows some sort of mythical trajectory, perhaps. Um, and of course I was occupying what had traditionally been a sort of male male place, I guess. Not that I thought it thought of it like that, but I can see how other people might have thought, uh particularly other women, would have thought of it like that. So the effect that book has had has also been very surprising and somewhat bewildering to me. Um I mean I'm very lucky, dead lucky.
SPEAKER_04Okay, uh forgive me, we are jumping around a bit. But so this is after the success of tracks. But the journey itself off tracks, I suppose maybe it's hard to say where it begins, but I'd like to start from at least you moving to Sydney after your school has finished. Yeah. And you're vagabonding around. I believe you you squatted in an abandoned Erskineville house.
SPEAKER_00I did.
SPEAKER_04You fell in with uh a poker den. You were renting in Paddington and a whole bunch of places.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Okay. Well, it we have to situate all this in a particular era. Very important that. I mean, I'm sort of made by 68, early 70s, that culture. And it's a very narrow little window, that sort of 68 to 73, I think.
SPEAKER_04The revolutionary moment.
SPEAKER_00That moment, um, and young people in particular were all, you know, pushing boundaries, really pushing boundaries, and kind of there was the sense that it was we were tilling new ground because there was nothing ahead of us. To we were breaking new ground all the time. It was a terrific time to be young. Um, but of course there were a lot of casualties to that time as well. From produce everything, wildlife, you know. Um but I'm very grateful that I was formed during that time. I think it was um uh enriching and incredibly privileged in lots of ways. Um when I say privileged, I don't mean with money, I mean with a kind of psychic opportunity, I guess. Something like that.
SPEAKER_04Well what does what does that mean? Uh breaking.
SPEAKER_00It meant that we that my lot had this sense of Of going out into the world, and freedom was this huge value, and sort of finding out what you could do, who you were, um, how you could change the world. We really did believe we could change the world for the better. Um, so hugely experimental, dangerous uh in lots of ways, but also very um we really looked after each other. There was a tremendous sense of um brotherhood, sisterhood, if you like. Globally, not just in one place, but a whole sense that you belong to this movement of w what movement was that, at least in Sydney? Well, uh it was sort of like everywhere. It was politics. Politics was the root of it, changing things, making things um uprooting what had been corrupt and um sort of anti-human. So it involved rights for aboriginal people, it involved feminism, it involved, you know, a thousand and one things, racism, economic upheaval. All of that. Um so there were various um flavors, but there was a sense of great community as well, even when there were um antagonisms within. Um at the foundation of it all was this sense of togetherness and making a better world. Really, it was like that.
SPEAKER_04You you just sort of stumbled into it because you went to Sydney with sixty dollars in your pocket. Yeah. And I loved this detail from the book. You're just walking through Centennial Park, walking up to North Bondi, just walking around for the entire day and then sleeping on a park bench or squatting in an abandoned house at night, then you end up falling in with these people.
SPEAKER_00Well, I was a very unformed young person. Um for various reasons. I hadn't developed certain skills in life. Um and I knew that about myself. I knew that I was uh unformed, ignorant to the back teeth, and needing to learn, leading to l needing to catch up and to learn really how to be a human in the world. Um so that really was my project at that time. I guess I was 18 or something like that. So I hopped on a truck, got a lift on a truck, went to Sydney. I as you say I had 60 bucks, which was quite a lot of money then, it felt like a lot of money. Um and I just landed in Sydney and I lived on the streets. But these days, if you say you lived on the streets, it means something very negative or something tragic. Whereas for me it was complete freedom. It was like being an aristocrat, being a traveller in the world, you know, free. Um I slept in parks. I don't know how long that period was. A month probably, maybe I, you know, it's all fuzzy. It's a long time. Yeah, yeah. But I learnt that city. I walked everywhere, I walked miles and miles every day, sort of learning where I was, learning how it worked. Um, and then eventually found this abandoned little cottage and went in and squatted there. And started reading, um, mostly stealing books, frankly.
SPEAKER_04Which I think was you said the the only type of theft you never felt guilty about.
SPEAKER_00That's right, that's right. And I also one thing I'm very proud of is that Tracks for a number of years was the most stolen book in Australia. So I feel I paid my dues. Absolutely. Um so it was a huge learning period and self-education, autodidact um period of life. And when I felt that I had done enough of that to be able to sort of move out a bit, um then I sort of became part of that political life in Sydney with what was then called the Push, which was a very um disparate group of artists and bohemians and intellectuals and um and so on. And so I lived that sort of life, sharing houses, um, and again learning, learning, learning all the time. Um money, of course, was always, you know, we were always getting odd jobs. Um I was a waitress often, bars, um uh artist model, and then got a job in this gambling club. And fell in I became a poker dealer. That was my role in the club. But I just fell in love with that game. It's the transcendent game, poker.
SPEAKER_04And it was five-card stud.
SPEAKER_00Five card stud, yeah.
SPEAKER_04I think as well, you also played it quite a bit.
SPEAKER_00I played it enough.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, there was a back and forth about how you sometimes had to manage the table to make sure the sharks would stay. Not the sharks, the whales would stay. Yes. And the sharks would leave.
SPEAKER_00The punter, you know, the mug punters. Um yes, uh well there'd there'd always be a house player at the table, and usually that was the proprietor Billy, and sometimes he couldn't be there, so uh often it'd be one of the mm mm bouncers, but sometimes that couldn't happen, so it'd be me. So I had to learn how to play. The true shark at the true and I just um it it was sort of um absolutely fascinating to me that game. Um and it was an extraordinary experience in that club. You know, often we'd be playing a game for 30 hours, um, keeping going on speed and whiskey and coffee and um and with this in this because it was illegal then, so it was a criminal fraternity. Um and they also were fascinating people. Um and that was, I guess, a couple of years of my life, or a year, I can't remember, but it seemed long enough.
SPEAKER_04Did that working in gambling, was that vice a part of the revolutionary political freedom this push movement was involved in, or did you catch some, you know, side eyes from some of your friends?
SPEAKER_00No, they would never have judged judged me, no. They wouldn't have some of them were gamblers. Uh i I mean, it's hard to explain that era. There was tremendous generosity, um always um this sort of bohemian, I suppose way of choosing to be against a system that we felt essentially corrupt. So even say in the in the gambling club, okay, it was run by these Krims, but they were paying off the police. Um the whole of the sort of um legal um police structure was corrupt. So, you know, who's the who are the bad guys there?
SPEAKER_04Yeah. It really does sound like I suppose that's why there's so much romanticization looks back on that period, because I can imagine it would have been great to have just been able to fall into a group of people who all generous, kind-hearted, and crazy people, and yeah, c kind of wild and open-minded, nothing's off limits. Truly, you know, that um, but then you do write that, and this is also there's a lot of echoes in some details of your life with Christopher Hitchens. I'm not sure if you're aware of that or not. No, um, but so he I won't go into it now, maybe we'll get it later.
SPEAKER_00But um goodness, I had no idea.
SPEAKER_04Well, maybe we'll get into it straight away. Uh, it does turn towards your mother though.
SPEAKER_00So okay, sure. No, up to you. I'm happy to go where you go.
SPEAKER_04So Hitchens was born 49. Right, yeah before me. Very similar to you, and he was raised in Portsmouth, uh, which was a navy kind of rough and tumble town in the UK. His father was much older than his mother. Similar. His mother was not an urbanite, but had aspirations for it. You know, she wanted to go to the concert and she wanted to have witty conversations with her smart friends at a London restaurant, but instead she was um put in this rural, kind of austerity-driven, with an older, former army um husband who who maybe really wanted to, you know, ha have this emotional side to him, but but it was never accessible. Yeah. Sounds very similar. And she ended up uh suicided. She suicided. Yeah, how old was Hitchens in his early 20s.
SPEAKER_00Huh, okay. I I didn't know that. I know you knew Christian.
SPEAKER_04And she was ethnically Jewish. Boy, yeah, so scary. It's and and I I'm not surprised that you would have known Hitchens. You at least at one point definitely travel in the same circles. Yeah. Um, but anyway, he also speaks in his own memoir. Much more comfortable with making it all about him than you were. Yes. Um, but about him also being swept up in this revolutionary moment of 68 and 69, and you know, he was a big shot at Cambridge and and politically at the front of it, holding speeches and we're gonna change the entire fucking world, watch us.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_04And then it all sort of crumbling down.
SPEAKER_00Indeed.
SPEAKER_04And him making the same observation as you, which is that half of them um maybe completely burnt themselves out with psychosis and all the drugs, and then the other half just went off into white shoe law firms and legal firms.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Which they would have done if the if that little period hadn't intervened, you know. Um sure. Yeah. Well, there was for me anyway, one of the reasons why I think I did the trip across Australia was something to do with that, the mood of of the early 70s of having failed, or it having been a bit, we're all, well, what happened, you know, like poof. Um and a lot of the energy, that sort of confident energy, had sort of dissipated into different sorts of movements and um that sense of purpose had pretty much uh dissipated, at least for me. Um so finding something to replace that, something that again that search for meaning that we all do, um that was a large part of choosing to do the camel trip.
SPEAKER_04And so you get in a train to Alice Springs, you have this shocking introduction to the city on the train, this old fella comes up and essentially just tries to court you directly in for the price of a beer. I've forgotten that, you know. No, but it's just such a stark introduction to this frontier town, which was Alice Springs.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it was a very rough place then, a very um racially tense place. Um it was a horrible place, actually.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, you describe it very, very, very well. So I I'm gonna butcher it completely, but some feeling is I hated this place, but I really wanted to be here. Yeah, something along those lines.
SPEAKER_00Don't remember that. But it was certainly a compelling place because also, again, politically land rights legislation was about to happen. Um, I got there just before the influx of young, tertiary educated, left-ish people who'd came in to help administer the act and to set up pro-Aboriginal organizations to help Aboriginal people organize themselves, um, to work for Aboriginal people. So the first year there was really very grim because I was uh I stood out like a I really stood out. Right. Um and I got a lot of antagonism. Um and I was genuinely appalled when I saw the kind of overt racism and cruelty there. Um and then these young people started arriving, and of course they became my sort of friendship group, and those friends are still very tight even now, yeah, decades later.
SPEAKER_04They still live in the sp in Alice?
SPEAKER_00Some do, some don't, mostly d mostly not.
SPEAKER_04Um But you get off the uh train and you end up falling in at the pub working there for a bit. This is after as well, kind of vagabonding for a period of time. Yeah. Um, but then you fall under the the employment of Kurt, who just seems like such a maniac.
SPEAKER_00He was a complete maniac. But the more I sort of think about Kurt, you know, now that I'm older, I realize how much I actually uh owe him in a way. I mean, he was a monster. I mean he treated me appallingly, and um he backed out of our deal after I'd worked for him for nothing for a year. But I think because he was so rigid, um I had to learn the skills that he had really well, like from the bottom up. Um so I owe him. Um he had a camel farm and I went to work for him, and um he was a bully and a monster, but every day, you know, I was up at five, I had to do everything perfectly. He insisted that I do everything perfectly. Um so I learned. I learned a lot about camels.
SPEAKER_04And the idea was that you would work for him and then you would get three camels. Yeah. And he totally scored you on the deal.
SPEAKER_01Yep.
SPEAKER_04And you ended up uh then getting camels from this really kind Afghani fella. And it turns out that uh with Afghani immigration, I don't know the year, but they brought in a bunch of camels.
SPEAKER_00Sort of 1850s, roughly. Really? That long ago. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_04So why did we why did Australia bring them over to begin with?
SPEAKER_00To open up the desert areas. Um they were building the Overland Telegraph, that came a bit later, if I remember, but to build roads, build infrastructure, get goods out to remote communities. Um so the Afghans brought these long strings of camels for transport. Um, yeah, they're extraordinary people.
SPEAKER_04But they were constructing um their own demise in a way.
SPEAKER_00Indeed.
SPEAKER_04Because they were no longer necessary once all that.
SPEAKER_00Once all that infrastructure was there, and it's sort of a sad story in many ways. Um, because they let their camels go when they were no no longer economically feasible. And of course, what then happened was that the camels had found paradise, and they have replicated, you know, hugely, and they're now doing a lot of damage in the desert along with all other introduced animals. Um, so it's a sad thing really.
SPEAKER_04Um but they are world-class camels now.
SPEAKER_00They're very well, the sorts of camels they brought in were draft animals, you know, heavy lifters, so they're not racing animals like you see in UAE and places like that. Um but they're pretty much disease-free. They're very strong because um because of their original genetics, but they've also um been in this fabulous place for them, you know, they're fat and and doing very well. So, yes, they're very high-quality camels.
SPEAKER_04And then you end up getting these camels and you embark on this magnificent journey, and at some stage Rick comes into your life. Do you think that without his photos, that the story would have ever gotten as big as it got?
SPEAKER_00And the poor the photos were a huge part of it. And um, I was very ambivalent about having the photographer there. Um, I was very ambivalent about approaching National Geographic um because I felt I was selling out.
SPEAKER_03Um But you needed the money to it.
SPEAKER_00I absolutely had to somehow find a couple of thousand dollars, and that's all it was. And again, it doesn't sound like much now, but it was a lot then, to get my equipment. Um I had to build everything myself, but I still needed stuff. I needed to buy a rifle, I needed blah blah. So I met Rick in Alice Springs. Um, he'd seen me cleaning windows, which was one of my jobs out there, um, and I think he was a bit dazzled. Um and he said, Well, why don't you write to Geographic? And I said, I Geographic, um and he convinced me, and I did, and there was a very sweet editor there who took it seriously and came to visit me, and they gave me four thousand dollars, I think, can't remember, something like that, a fortune. So that actually allowed me to get all the gear together and plan the whole thing properly. But I uh was very ambivalent about Rick visiting me on the trip to take pictures. I didn't want him there, I didn't want anyone there. And I think I was a bit naive about that. I didn't have any idea really what that would mean. Um I mean, certainly personally it felt I felt a bit queasy because it was like selling out, as I said, but I had no idea how it would affect a public persona. And of course, uh he took the most exquisite photos. I mean, they are beautiful, beautiful photos. But when I first saw them, I said, Rick, you've made me look like a vogue model. That's not me. And I understood then the implications, the repercussions of having these images, which were essentially Rick's trip, Rick's vision, not mine. And if that journey was to do with anything, it was to do with being the subject of my own life, not an object. And beautiful as those photos were, they turned me into an object. And also, I had no idea I was beautiful, none. I had no idea, but you look at those photos, and there's a beautiful blonde young woman in a sarong riding a camel. How could you go wrong? But all of that had nothing to do with me.
SPEAKER_04But you were 27, 28 at the time. Yeah. How did you not have a sense for your own beauty?
SPEAKER_00Um, well, it's a complicated question. A lot of women don't have a sense of their own beauty. Um, some do and they're lucky. Um but I never have. Um I don't know why. It just I suppose it's not important. It's not how I again it's not how I think of myself. I think of myself as a person. I look in the mirror of this, not bad, not terrible, you know, but it sort of doesn't it's not something I feel I own and therefore can use, if you know what I mean. Okay.
SPEAKER_04But I just and forgive me if this is really bad observation, but by the time you're 27, 28, you've had male attention, you've met lots of other women, and you surely must have gotten a sense for I I I can evoke these responses in people. There must be something about me that is alluring, whether it's not just how you physically look, but also how you are, and I know, complete mystery. Right, okay.
SPEAKER_00Complete mystery.
SPEAKER_04D do you think because I I've having only known you for twenty minutes, um, but having, you know, gotten to know you in a very more intimate sense through reading your books, like there is something alarmingly disarming about you. Um d do you have any sense what that is? Is is it something you've grown into? Do you think you've sort of always had it?
SPEAKER_00Do you know I just don't know. Do people make that observation? They have I think perhaps because that lack of nouse that I had as a young person and you know my early history perhaps my I'm an oddball. I don't really fit anywhere and things that concern other people often don't concern I don't care. Um Yeah, I I don't really know how to answer it m better than that, but I don't My values are to do with something else. Trying to find some trying to find out what life's for, what it's about.
SPEAKER_04And because the values exist over there, everything over here is just I don't even know.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I don't even know, and it's just chance anyway. You know?
SPEAKER_04You mean genetically how you might end up looking.
SPEAKER_00Exactly.
SPEAKER_04Right.
SPEAKER_00And in fact, so much of it is chance. It's not exactly it's not anything I did. Um and therefore I I'm probably b uh it's probably affected my life being beautiful. I don't know, but it's not something that I've ever felt that belonged to me. I guess that's what I would say.
SPEAKER_04Do you think in a sense it sort of belongs to your mother?
SPEAKER_00She was pretty and unusual. Um no, it's just the luck of the draw. Totally chance.
SPEAKER_04This might be out of place, but I can't help but think about it, since you've just said that. But you close the book and the opening chapter with the same line, which is my mother is as close to me and as hidden from me as my own face. With that last part maybe echoing this theme you're doing here. But I mean I don't I don't really get what that means. I don't understand that.
SPEAKER_00Well, the first part my mother is as close to me. I'm from her body, so but it's she is hidden from me in the same sense that I am hidden from me. You can see my face, but I can't. Um you can have ideas about me that may have nothing to do with me. Um we're all hidden from ourselves. And I think part of being alive is the job of getting closer and closer to what you might actually be. And therefore, so much of what we take to be our own is just chance and doesn't have much to do with us really.
SPEAKER_04And by take to be our own, you mean maybe our behaviors or our outcomes.
SPEAKER_00And what we look like, how we behave, all of those things.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, it feels like you're you're really informed by the sort of free will argument, the case being that we don't actually have any free will. It's all just one experience after another that started well before we were even born. Billions of billions billions of um causes and actions that we'll never be able to see or compute. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I'm not sure. Um I'm sort of on the fence about that. Um I don't know if you've listened to Sapolski and indeed Chris Hitchens and a few other Sam Harris. And Sam Harris, indeed. They're sort of radical um um free willers. Free willers or non-free willers, actually. But I'd keep a little uh you know, I'm pretty much in agreement, but I'd say there's one percent of me that thinks there's room for There's room for agency, right? I think so, somewhere in there, but you know it's very hard to find, um, it's very hard to defend philosophically. Um but I do feel somewhere in there is the possibility of agency.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_00But maybe not.
SPEAKER_04But therefore, in that agency, you can still take you know full responsibility for a lot of the outcomes. I I don't like how sort of nihilistic that idea is, which is like whichever direction I go, it's someone else's problem. Rather, you're still the owner of this mind and body moving throughout the world.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Well, whether you can make a decision, yes or no, we simply don't know, I think. That's what I would say about that, and their confidence. What I would say about the Sam Harris Chris uh confidence about that is they make no room at all for the sentence, I don't know. And I kind of worship doubt. I worship the phrase I don't know. I think it's because if you don't have I don't know, you can't learn anything.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, it's the end of it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_04I I had to disagree with you, but I think you're doing Christopher Hitchens a disservice there. He is certainly at the altar of we don't know, we don't have the answers. All we can do is try and figure them out. Yeah. Whereas, at least in their primary argument against against God, is that they're presenting a book that has all the answers. No more questions need to be asked because here is everything you ever need to know.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_04But that sort of gets away from free will and definitely gets away from you.
SPEAKER_00Sorry. So we went on a tangent there.
SPEAKER_04That's okay. So look, Trax is is a great movie. Did you like the movie?
SPEAKER_00I like the movie. The movie has a long history. I don't know if you want to know that.
SPEAKER_04Let's do it. Let's start us off with Sidney Pollock and your lunch with him.
SPEAKER_00Sid. Oh, Sid. Again, I'd had no idea, nouse about any of that. Um I was living in London in Doris's house with my then partner Steve, and um once the book was out and there'd been this huge fanfare, I started getting offers for film. And my feeling was that a film should be made in Australia by Australians, but most importantly that I wouldn't need to have some control because of the way Aboriginal people might be portrayed. And I felt I had that responsibility to them, um, that there wouldn't be misrepresentation or so on. Anyway, um, I got an offer from Sidney Pollack, and he was flying high after um out of Africa. Uh a film I didn't particularly like, but anyway. Um, so he took me to lunch and he was utterly adorable. I really liked him, and he was very funny, and and the first thing he said was, um, well, honey, you're not gonna like what I'm gonna do to your book. And I just loved him for that because it was so upfront. He offered me a lot of money. I thought about it, and I said no, for the previous reasons that I gave. And then I sort of forgot about it a bit. But then I started getting these other offers, and people, you know, they would send me manu uh scripts of such appalling, unspeakable wrongness in every way. Just terrible. You would die rather than see this film made. Um, and some of it was very funny. Uh so eventually I gave, I sold an option to an English company, a small, um, they just made a lovely little film called My Brilliant Laundrette. I don't know if you remember, it's long ago. Um, terrific little film. So I sort of trusted them. Um and I said, you know, we'll keep it a small film with this Australian content. I've got some control over Aboriginal, blah, blah, blah, blah. So time moves on. I get a call from that company saying, guess what? We're getting a co-production with Hollywood, and Julia Roberts is going to play you. And it was just, oh my god, what have I done? Not that I don't love Julia Roberts, but it was just the wrong thing. And then I started getting these scripts. One of which I remember Robin Davidson heads off for the desert. She's a very troubled girl. Um she's a New Yorker. She heads off for the desert, she gets lost in the desert, and some Aborigines find her and they teach her the dreaming. And there's a scene where these Aboriginal men sort of carry her around a campfire as she learns the snake dreaming of something utterly unspeakable. Anyway, so that's how that was. Um, and eventually all of that fell through, thank God. And finally, then years and years later, I sold it to Emile Sherman here in Australia. Um, again, because I really did trust them. And the only thing I said was, I think Mia Wasikowska should play me because she's just such a lovely little actress, really good actor. And we got her, so that was great. Um I think they were honourable. They tried to honour the the essence of the book. I'm not naive enough to think that a film should be a representation of a book. A film has to solve different problems to a book. Of course it's going to be different. Um I'm still great friends with Mia, so that's lovely. So, all in all, it was quite a good experience. But, you know, it again, it doesn't have anything to do with me.
SPEAKER_04How much money, if you remember, did Sydney offer you?
SPEAKER_00Look, I think in my mind it's about 600,000 American.
SPEAKER_04That would have gone in your pocket.
SPEAKER_00I think so, but I could be wrong. Wow. But that's sort of what I remember. Um maybe that anyway, look, I really don't know. I shouldn't even answer the question because I don't, but that's sort of what I remember. A lot of money.
SPEAKER_04And even though Sid was up front with him maybe bastardizing your story, is there any part of you that regrets?
SPEAKER_00Oh, of course, because in the end, you you know, you can't control film. No, no, no. You as a writer, that you've got no control that you can they can write it into the contract, but you actually have to be a producer, director, and writer. That's right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Did you uh maintain contact with Sidney Pollock after that?
SPEAKER_00No, no.
SPEAKER_04Is he still alive?
SPEAKER_00No, he died a couple of years ago, I think. Okay.
SPEAKER_04Did you ever get a sense uh for what he thought of tracks, how it ended up going?
SPEAKER_00I have no idea. Um he must have liked it or he wouldn't have wanted to make a film.
SPEAKER_04No, the film that was made.
SPEAKER_00Oh, I think he died before it was made, I think. Not sure.
SPEAKER_04So um the book is a huge bestseller and you're now plunged into literary fame, and you're living in London. Uh talk about the the sort of circles that you're now introduced to, kind of like the literary elite of London, at a very exciting time to be among the literary elite.
SPEAKER_00Well, I sort of put London into two phases, if you like. The first phase was that phase, the early phase, where I'd been writing to Doris Lessing. We had a correspondence, she was a hero to me through her books. Um she had actually said, you know, when I asked her, should I or should I not write a book? And she said, if you can write a good letter, blah, blah, blah. And then she said, Well, why don't you come to England? If your publishers are here, come to England. And I thought, yeah, okay, why not? So indeed I went to England via India, which is how India fits into the picture. Um, and I lived in this crummy little flat for a while, writing tracks, um, and getting to know Doris. And eventually she said, Look, you shouldn't be living here. You come, I've bought a new house, there's a little apartment underneath it. Come and live with me. So for the next two or three years I lived in a little part of her house. And um I suppose you would say she was my mentor, my literary mother. I owe her so much.
SPEAKER_04You quote her in the beginning of tracks.
SPEAKER_00Do I?
SPEAKER_04I believe so.
SPEAKER_00Can't even remember.
SPEAKER_04The opening quote. I really hope that's right. My gut tells me it is. Doris is a name that stands for.
SPEAKER_00Yes, yes, of course, of course. Sorry, it slipped my mind. It is a long time ago. Um she didn't help me with writing at all. That was a and I didn't want her to. That's not what that was about. Um, and in fact, when the book was ready for publication, I gave it to her then. And my stomach was in my mouth, as you can imagine. And she came down the stairs, she read it in sort of a gulp, and she looked very severe, and I thought, oh, really, this is terrible. And she said, Well, Robbie, it seems you have written a classic.
SPEAKER_04That must have felt amazing to hear. Did you did you did you enjoy because you've spoken a lot about how writing this memoir was extremely difficult. But did you enjoy that process of putting together these sentences and and and and creating this magnificent story of tracks?
SPEAKER_00With tracks I did enjoy the writing because I was innocent of what, you know, I didn't have a sense of an audience out there. Um I didn't have a sense of any self uh censorship. I didn't have um, I mean, I'd loved literature, but I didn't have a sense of suddenly joining that gang. It wasn't, you know, I was just telling this story as best I could. So I did enjoy the work. Um and I worked very hard at it. And what I found fascinating, again, this is about memory. In that first phase of writing the first draft of tracks, in that weird little flat, not the Doris one, the one before, I remembered every single campsite of that eight-month journey. Every one.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, that's kind of remarkable.
SPEAKER_00Incredible. It was so deeply.
SPEAKER_04So you could walk. Walk to the day, see it. Yes. Yeah, well.
SPEAKER_00Amazing. But as I wrote the book, those memories seemed to sort of dissolve. And it was like the book cannibalized the memories. It's a very strange process. Yeah, that is strange. Yeah, really. Today, can you remember a lot of those campsites? I can if I really apply myself. But again, the photographs have interfered with that a lot. Right. And I realize that I might be remembering somewhere, but then somehow there'll be a photograph that's getting in the way, or it's a bit suspiciously similar. And again, you know, this mystery of memory, how the hell it works. It's a very slippery, complicated um phenomenon.
SPEAKER_04And stylistically, did you take any inspiration, or was that all just original Robbie?
SPEAKER_00This is totally, totally original.
SPEAKER_04Do you think you write as you speak?
SPEAKER_00Yes, I think I'm very audio. I think that's that's well spotted. And I also often will read it if I've written something, I'll read it aloud, and I can hear if it's overwritten or there's an adjective too many, it's that sort of thing.
SPEAKER_04Well the same words appeared too many times in paragraphs.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And also it's about rhythm and flow.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, you um This is again a cliche, but very lyrical in in the in the way you write.
SPEAKER_00Um Well, I think music music had a lot to do with that, I think. Um music's been important in my life and in my family, so that's possibly connected to how I write.
SPEAKER_04You were yourself a musician.
SPEAKER_00And I was, yes.
SPEAKER_04Do you still get on the keys?
SPEAKER_00Look, I just recently decided I have a piano in there, I'll tell you later. Um I've just recently decided that no, I won't play anymore. Okay, why is that? Because I hear how bad I am. You know.
SPEAKER_04Don't be like that. That's alright.
SPEAKER_00It should be alright, but and I thought, well, if it doesn't give me a lot of pleasure, sure. You know, I'd rather put on a C D and listen to some other genius playing Chopin rather than me, you know.
SPEAKER_04Uh and with your writing style, um, and forgive me if this is two in the weeds, but I just I it's one of the things I really want to extract, if possible, from writers I admire. You know, actually when they sit down at the kit at the keyboard, how do they construct their sentences? So are you sentence, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, next sentence, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, or are you dump, rewrite, dump, rewrite? Do you go in big bursts of energy, or do you have a routine?
SPEAKER_00I certainly don't have a routine. I wish I did. I think it depends on with me, each book has been a bit different that way. Tracks, you know, I could work eight hours a day, absolute focus and concentration.
SPEAKER_04Um that would have felt great.
SPEAKER_00It was, it was terrific. Hard work, but it felt right.
SPEAKER_04Fulfilling.
SPEAKER_00That felt right. And I'd write often quite a bit in a day. My partner would read it at night, which was lovely. Um, and often he was quite astute. Um, but also it's just very nice for someone else to read it. Um, but I was pretty ruthless even then with editing. Although tracks, because of the nature of the innocence of the writing, it didn't actually need a lot of editing. And luckily, I had a very uh a terrific edit editor at Jonathan Cape who edited very lightly, and I think she was correct. So it's a bit raw, but it's kept all that energy. Um so that was tracks, but I guess as I got older and more self-conscious about writing, it became more difficult.
SPEAKER_04Self-conscious because there is now an expectation for what a Robert Davidson book should be.
SPEAKER_00There's a literary world that's looking at me. Woo! Very scary. Um and also I one realizes that it's actually a a responsibility writing what you put down on paper. Um maybe you can't just say anything or what you want to, you know, so suddenly all these strictures, internalized strictures, start to happen. Um when I wrote Desert Places, well, I was constantly on the move. I was living between London and India. It was a very complicated life. Um I'd write a little bit in India, and then two months later I might write a little bit in England. So a very different sort of process. Um again, more difficult than tracks. Um and then with the memoir, because of the nature of what it was, the internal critic was so loud. Um and my concern with the morality of it, with the kindness of it, with an awareness of how slippery memory is, all of those things made it very difficult. To get to the computer every day.
SPEAKER_04Okay, really? Oh yeah. But once the word started flowing, did you find yourself deleting all the time?
SPEAKER_00Um some days would flow, some days nothing. Um, with tremendous procrastination all the time, painful process. Um mostly I'd say I'd get stuff down and then edit, and then edit again, and then edit again, and then edit again, and then read it aloud and edit again, and then move on to some next bit, not necessarily in a linear way. It was sort of like a jigsaw.
SPEAKER_04You're scrapping together different chapters.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, like a sort of 3D jigsaw is what it felt like.
SPEAKER_04Back to whatever the original question was, which is about this literary circle that you're now a part of as a you know, the new hot author on the market, um, this aspirational woman. Who were the circles that you're involved with?
SPEAKER_00This is the first part of London, which was really centred around Doris. Now, Doris was an extraordinary and unusual person. She was highly individualistic. Um, she'd had a colonial background like me, so she was both part of and highly respected in a literary circle in London, but also sort of fundamentally an outsider.
SPEAKER_04Um colonial background means she wasn't from the UK?
SPEAKER_00She was from Africa. Oh, okay, right. And she had arrived in England with a baby under one arm and ten quid in the other. Um sort of in the 50s, I guess. Yeah. Um so she was both of that world and uh unusual in that world and not English. So the so I did meet um famous people through her, but characteristic of Doris's get-togethers, there'd be some poor person she'd found in the street and brought in, there'd be her son's school friends, there'd be some ultra hyper, ultra famous person, there'd be a social worker that she'd found doing good works, like she was egalitarian in that way, that was very unusual in England. Um and again this sort of quest for the genuine meant that I wasn't interested in people's fame or status. What I was interested in was knowledge and whether people were genuine or not.
SPEAKER_04Did you did you find that typically the famous names which me in the audience might recognize didn't meet that standard?
SPEAKER_00Often, because they're just people like anyone else. So some you know, sometimes you'd like them, sometimes you wouldn't like them, sometimes you thought they were twat, sometimes you thought they were fantastic. Um just like everyone else.
SPEAKER_04Did Chris Vitchens meet the fantastic standard?
SPEAKER_00I liked Chris. I but I met him in the second phase. Okay, sorry. So that was the first phase, and I was still very young and very, I think, very green, very um naive.
SPEAKER_04You're 28-9?
SPEAKER_00How old was I? So 81. I would have been 31 when TRACS was published. So then I went back to Australia. Um life moved on. Um I sort of had a life in Australia. I then left my partner, and that's when I met Solman, and um went back to London with him, and that was sort of the second phase where I met a whole different kind of literary world that was very concerned with literary status, um again, very impressive, many, many impressive people, but it was a different social milieu to the one I'd had with Doris.
SPEAKER_04Speaking of Salman, yeah, uh in the book you don't even mention his name. No, and in interviews, and even now it's like hard to say the word, I I I sense that you want to move away from that as quickly as you can. So I just want to be sensitive as to not pick at a deep wound.
SPEAKER_00It's not that so much as um fame is a very distorting thing. Um and it was a hugely important relationship for all sorts of reasons, but I don't mention him because it's not important who he was. What was important was the effect that that relationship had and its sort of relationship to the past and so on. And what his name was was utterly irrelevant.
SPEAKER_04But but it at least for me, it stands out as as a name on the page. Oh wow, time with Salman Rashdie. This is after he's had a death sentence put on him. He's in the height of his fatwa.
SPEAKER_00Um and Well, I was living with him through the writing of satanic verses, so yeah. So it was um quite a that was very much part of uh of the tumultuous tumultuousness of that time.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, you write about the relationship. It was an excited infant love a gone and nuclear. Why did it why did it go nuclear?
SPEAKER_00Who knows? I mean, we were both deeply neurotic people, I guess. Um very intense relationship, hugely intense. Um He was writing satanic verses, so it was sort of occupying a strange sort of headspace anyway. Um I was having to fit into this whole new London um quite insecure. Um also trying to write a book, which I had no idea how to do or why I should do it, but I'd, you know, sort of been told I should write a novel, so okay. Um so I think the a combination of things. It I saw it, I think, as us both being like children. Um emotionally like children. These two children got together and it was sort of explosive. Um and neither of us had the equipment really to emotional equipment or the the equipment of maturity to to make it work. It was just too hard.
SPEAKER_04So so the highs were incredibly high, but the lows were as terrible, terrible terrible fights and things like this.
SPEAKER_00Just terrible and um and never knowing when it was going to fall apart or why or you know what I'd done and Oh, that's horrible. Yeah, no, it was it it was um quite destructive to me anyway.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um but fascinating.
SPEAKER_04Even forty years after the events?
SPEAKER_00Well, now I don't think about it really. I mean I think about it when you ask me about it, but otherwise it's not even not relevant to me anymore. I don't have any residue of it. But after his attack, did you feel like I want to see how he's going or well I felt very disturbed um of course, um, but in a sense not personally. It w it was almost like I was disturbed because it had happened to a fellow writer, and it that's a terrible, terrible thing. Um and it was Salman and but somehow that didn't that's not what it was about because I seem to have got rid of that connection, I suppose.
SPEAKER_04Martin Amos once described him as a a falcon looking through a Venetian blind.
SPEAKER_00He was always good with words, that boy.
SPEAKER_04I suppose this is also a person you would have uh travelled with. Hitchens, Amos, Emaque.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, somewhat. Yeah. Um well you know, in these difficult in the second phase, you know, there were Solman's world, and I had to fit into that world. I liked them all. I liked Chris a lot. Um, I liked Martin a lot, I liked his partner a lot. Um, but you know, I wasn't I didn't see myself as a literary figure. I suppose that's what was sort of w slightly weird for me in that world.
SPEAKER_04Fish out of water, not interested in the status and the aura. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um and sort of looking, I think, for people I could be with without having to be either Solman's partner or a writer, or you know, it was a strange time. But I did meet other people, so that's when I met um Julie Christie, and she became uh a very, very dear friend, and I started to have access to her world at that time. Very um um, you know, it was something of an alternate. I didn't know them well enough, but I liked them a lot, and that included Duncan Campbell and various other people.
SPEAKER_04Who just passed away.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_04Um you mentioned in one of your interviews, this takes us all the way back to the the beginning about the style of autobiography, but some French author, I think you celebrated that she wrote it saying we always never I and then what's her name? I don't know.
SPEAKER_00But she's a terrific writer, she won the Nobel really for that book. Um The Years. The Years, terrific book.
SPEAKER_04But then um Salmon Rushdie wrote his autobiography under a pseudonymous name, which is also kind of another way of maybe um getting away with the the problems of memory. The problems of yes, he's a fictional character, sure, it's based on my life. Yeah, but it's yeah.
SPEAKER_00Well, we're getting very used to this now. I mean, the you know, it used to be that writing that sort of memoir was gosh, so radical. Um now it's just sort of second nature. It's a postmod, post, post, post, post, post, postmodern. Um but that doesn't make it ungenuine. It is we're responding to something in the in the atmosphere.
SPEAKER_04You're in your early thirties in Unfinished Woman. You talk about not even thinking about your mother until you were in your forties. But with all these friends that you have and these deep relationships that you you have in between then and 40, do you never people aren't asking you about your family and and you and you reveal to them, well, in fact, my mother committed suicide when I was eleven.
SPEAKER_00Yes, I would all I wouldn't have hidden that fact. Um people probably knew if it came up in conversation, yes, you know, my mum suicided when I was a kid, you know, in some context of sharing our lives. Um but really thinking about her, really kind of thinking about, hey, what actually went on back there? Uh and I think this is what children do, it's a survival mechanism when some tragedy happens, you build a shell. And that is a very good protection. It it would it it was very good for me to do that. You know, all this sort of psycho babble about the I'm I'm being a bit.
SPEAKER_04Oh, that's okay. Lean into it.
SPEAKER_00I suppose there's the notion that you have to go and inspect everything and it's you know we're all traumatized and la la la la You know real traumatized people are you know what am I trying to say? One shouldn't over trauma. Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_04And then as well degrees of different character and how they deal with trauma.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. And you know, I didn't I suppose I didn't see my trauma as a trauma, I wouldn't have you ever used that word. And it was just a part of what had happened to me, that's all. You know, um but then when I approached the age at which she died, which was 46, um, and I was sort of coming up to that time, it was a very I was under a lot of pressure. I was living between London and India. Um a lot of uh difficulties in life really. But I started to she started to come back is how I think of it. And also music was starting to come back. Um so I bought a piano um in this complex that I shared with Julie Christie and Sally Potter, a group of us. Um and I started playing again, and that music started to trigger off memories. Um and prior to that I would have said I have very few memories of my past, but then I realized there was a whole stack of them, I just hadn't bothered to look.
SPEAKER_04Um they did the the musical passcode.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. Um and songs, you know, songs from when I was a kid, and um I remember sitting in the bath in Blackbird Yard and suddenly this singing to myself Alice Blue Gown, which I'd sung when I was about eight at a at a concert, and just things like that, really quite weird, these memories surfacing, keyed initially by music, but then sort of coming of their own accord because I was looking at them. And that's when I first started writing stuff down, not necessarily with an idea to writing a book, but just writing it down because it was so odd.
SPEAKER_04Somewhere to organize it.
SPEAKER_00A way of organizing it, perhaps, yes. Um then I tried to write about it, and I wrote all these beginnings, and I just knew they were all wrong. And then I decided, okay, I will never write a book about this, it's impossible. And I wrote a piece, I wrote a little article, um, I think it was for Grant or I can't remember, um talking about memoir, and and saying why this particular memoir could not be written, and sent it off to my agent, and he said, You're mad, this is the first chapter. Um, and indeed that did become the introduction. Um yes, where were we?
SPEAKER_04I I initially asked you why, not why, but rather it's kind of perplexing, I'm imagining you you have a lot of friends and and a friendship you sort of learn about the other person. And for instance, if we had just met and we were comfortable with each other and and you revealed that your mother committees, I might have asked you like why. Why?
SPEAKER_00I I probably would have had an answer back then. I would have said something like, Oh well, she was depressed and you know, we lived in the country, and but I wouldn't have You can kind of keep picking at that, like, oh, why was she depressed?
SPEAKER_04Like, what was your father like? What about your sister? I've never really heard you speak about her much. You know, and then maybe you I'm just imagining that it seems inconceivable these conversations wouldn't have happened and therefore triggered for you, oh my god, I haven't dealt with this, I haven't thought about this.
SPEAKER_00I think I just that was part of who I was of not thinking about that unconscious unconscious, but part of the protection, part of the shell, perhaps. Um, so you can have sort of basic memories without actually having gone there and looked.
SPEAKER_04Right. Really investigating. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And also it didn't particularly interest me. I wasn't interested in the past. I hadn't given that mother a thought. From the day she died till then, I honestly hadn't thought about her at all.
SPEAKER_04Do you have do you have a a rational explanation for that that you've been able to conjure?
SPEAKER_00Well, I think because I wasn't interested in the past. Um I wasn't interested in scrabbling around in all that muck. Um I was very key to going ahead and um making a life. You know, making a life, making a life work, um, finding out about life. Yeah. And um experiencing the world. Yes. And the past was there, but not not important. And of course then it did become important.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. Do you have because a part of how you've dealt with your depression, at least from my understanding of the book, I don't want to, you know, put words in your mouth. But is that you know, really started looking into the neuroscience of it all, chemical imbalances in the brain and environmental factors that might make us feel certain ways. Is is there any neuroscientific explanation for why you fall very depressed at a very similar age to your mother, even though environmentally you have completely different circumstances?
SPEAKER_00Well, you know, school's still out on all of this. We're just beginning to understand how the brain might work. We have no idea what consciousness is. Um, and any scientist who says that they do is just silly, I think. And maybe one day we will have a materialist explanation, I don't know, but we sure as hell don't now. Um so why are some brains susceptible to depression or any of these uh uncomfortable states?
SPEAKER_04Extreme emotion?
SPEAKER_00Extreme something. They're just extreme. Um, extreme pain. They're actually painful. And it's a weird kind of pain because it hovers somewhere between the physical body and the mental body. Um but it is a terrible pain, and I it is a truly terrible disease. Um but even then it teaches you a lot.
SPEAKER_04Do you still have bouts of of very low times?
SPEAKER_00Um I'm certainly have a mutable and melancholic temperament. Okay.
SPEAKER_04Like to wallow sometimes.
SPEAKER_00No, I wouldn't say that. I try to deal with it. I don't like um being engulfed by it. And I don't I've learned how to manage my mental states quite well. Um and again, uh they're not I mean they're painful, but they are not without value. Um, because they've taken me lots of places.
SPEAKER_04There was uh two things that stood out to me regarding the depression and yourself having suicidal ideation.
SPEAKER_00And I knew I knew I would never suicide.
SPEAKER_04Okay, so because at least I want to make sure I get the right quotes, but there were two there was one time in tracks and then one time in Unfinished Woman where you did explicitly plan like this is Oh no, I've never planned suicide. No, no, no, you're quite wrong. You talk about in tracks about um I could just walk out into the desert and I could take a gun with me and I'd be a mess to nobody, no one would need to know. And then the Kurt's wife sort of snapped you out of it. Not not because you were talking about it, but she said something to you which snapped you out of it. And then in Unfinished Woman you're having a um you're with your sister. Um I think yeah, this is long after you spread your father's ashes. Was it with your sister? I think it was with your sister, and and you were pretty pretty much saying, like, I'm gonna end it all. And then she takes a knife, your father's old knife out of the drawer and says, Well go and help do it then. And that sort of snapped you out of it again.
SPEAKER_00Look, no, it's not like that. In a sense, for me, the key to the memoir is that section towards the end where I had this sort of um insight. And I would have been twelve-ish, probably a year after mum's death. Um and I was out walking, and I had this nihilistic insight into the how reality really is, what it is. And it's this utterly mechanical, unloving, purposeless, utterly meaningless chaos of matter and We're just bags and meat and burger. We're just bags. We're just exactly and it it completely unraveled my world. And um and I was too young to know what the hell to do with it. But I it felled me, literally felled me. I had to lie on the grass and and that has been the most formative moment of my life, I think, to to deal with, to learn how to deal with a a profoundly nihilistic view and to counter that view. Um and that's when I went to my sister and I said, I d I I think I have to I I because I didn't know I didn't know what to do.
SPEAKER_04Oh, I'm sorry. Was that memory when you were only twelve?
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Forgive me. Then I've misunderstood. I thought this happened much later, but go on.
SPEAKER_00No, no, I said you're just a kid. And she and that's when she um and she responded rather cruelly, but in a way it snapped me out of you know, it sort of snapped me back into reality, I suppose. That's what I would say. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Okay, so do you find still the the purposelessness in that worldview of if we are just evolutionary meat and bones, there's nothing for us after it, then what the hell is the point of it all? Why bother doing this or that or this? Do you still feel that, or have you come on the other side? Really?
SPEAKER_00I struggle with it all the time.
SPEAKER_04I I find it totally liberating that that um that realization that and obviously the jewelry's still out. The minute that we we end our uh we finish our lives here, maybe we'll ascend to some pearly gates and it'll be like, damn it, we got a lot of things wrong. But if it's not the case, and it is just lights out, return to the earth. I the reason I find that liberating is because it means there is a finite time here for you to do something. To be and it doesn't have to be great, it doesn't have to be anything, but it's here and it's up to you if you want to make it happen or not. Whether that's you know, falling in love with a person, potentially making another life, having an amazing career, writing an amazing book, you know, like all this sort of stuff. That's at least on on that same realization, yeah. That's more how I reacted to it. It's funny, my my wife's more similar to you. She finds it very difficult to deal with.
SPEAKER_00What I would say is that I it's not it's not for me, it's not to do with whether this life continues or doesn't continue. I'm an atheist. Um I think it's highly unlikely that anything continues. Um but you know, anything's possible, let's say, the the great I don't know, but it just seems pretty unlikely to me.
SPEAKER_04Show me some evidence.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, right. Um it's deeper than that. It's that the whole thing is utterly pointless. It is a cosmic nihilism and it is hard to bear. Um so I do try to counter that. Um Buddhism has helped me a lot. I don't mean um the Buddhism was bells and whistles, I mean the way Buddhism Buddhist philosophy understands the human mind. I think there there's an immense sophistication of understanding there. Um and that has uh helped that has helped me with that nihilism um that we walk this sort of edge between nihilism and idealism.
SPEAKER_04It is a knife's edge.
SPEAKER_00It is a knife edge. Um But yes, it's uncomfortable. Okay. Often uncomfortable.
SPEAKER_04You have a and again, I'm meditating it. If it's too sensitive, please just tell me. Because I might not know the the boundaries.
SPEAKER_00Sure, sure.
SPEAKER_04Uh but there is a there's a prickly feeling between you and your sister. Is is that an understatement?
SPEAKER_00It is an understatement, but I don't want to go there because it's not fair. It's not fair to her. If she had her own podcast, that'd be fine, but she doesn't. And again, it's one of the problems with memoir, that writing a memoir, whether you like it or not, gives you the power of the word, and it isn't fair. Um I've included her in the book where it was absolutely essential to the structure of the story, but otherwise I haven't gone there and I don't want to go there when I talk about it for those reasons.
SPEAKER_04Totally. Yeah. No problem at all. Yeah. After your mother did commit suicide, why did you not go to live with your father? You went to live with his brother, I believe. His sister. His sister. Twin sister.
SPEAKER_00Because my dad was that sort of dad. He was an Edwardian man, he was a man's man. The idea that he would know how to raise a daughter was just a fact, really.
SPEAKER_01Oh yeah. Okay.
SPEAKER_00You know, you've got to think this is post-Second World War, 50s generation, um, an older dad as well. The idea that he would raise a daughter, oh, how would that work? Um so and he was adorable, I mean, adorable man, but inadequate in all sorts of ways. Um he of course was also traumatized, he had found her. Um and it was decided, I'm not quite sure how it was decided. I think between my dad and my sister, they decided that the best thing for me would be to go to live with his twin sister, Aunt Gillian, who was a right old Tartar, um, rather wonderful woman, but knew nothing about children. Um so yes, it was just considered that that was okay. These days, that wouldn't happen.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, it'd be a social black mark, societal blackmark.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And also they didn't think of children in the same way that we think of children now.
SPEAKER_04Right.
SPEAKER_00No, they didn't understand what effects these things had on children.
SPEAKER_04Like them not letting you keep the dog, for example.
SPEAKER_00I know well that was pretty weird, I must say. To to send a motherless wave pet dog, just a little bit of empathy. Yeah, they they um destroyed the dog. That is pretty amazing.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00But eh.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. Your father had a stroke while reading tracks. Do you know how far into the book he got?
SPEAKER_00I don't. Um the sad thing about all of that, I was living in London because in those days the book came out in England first and then Australia, and there was quite a time gap. I think it was six weeks. So I knew that I would be going to Australia in six weeks' time to do the publicity tour. Um, and I wrote to Dad and I said, Um, you know, I'll be in Australia. Um, and I had to make a decision whether to send him a an English copy of the book or take it to him when I went. Exactly. So I thought, well, no, I'll send him a copy. And um he started reading it apparently. I obviously I wasn't there, and he went to our neighbour, who had been quite involved with our family. She was a lovely woman, kind woman. Um, and he was in tears. And the reason that I'd hesitated to send it to him was that I didn't want to stir him up. Um, and I think there was one sentence in tracks that obliquely refers to our family history. Um, and I just thought, ooh, it might just stir him up too much. Lo and behold, he reads the book, he goes next door in tears, because the first sentence of tracks was, I arrived in Alice Springs with six dollars and a dog or something like that. He goes next door in tears and says, Why didn't I ever give her any money? That's horrible. So you can't win, you know. Um poor chap. Um so I don't know how far he got into the book. Um I hope what he did read he enjoyed. I th he was tremendously proud of me.
SPEAKER_04That's amazing, though. He obviously would have um been some type of fulfillment for you doing that journey in the first place. Because it sounds like he was quite an adventurer as well.
SPEAKER_00He was, and it people have made the comment that obviously I was sort of doing something that like he had done, because he'd been in Africa living this the life of a big game hunter, you know, very much the man's man um Hemingway Exactly, oh exactly. Um so he would never have considered that I should that a girl should do such a thing. Um but the fact that I did, I think he was stunned by the fact that I did that trip, and then he became tremendously proud and sort of boring people with newspaper articles. Yeah, no, it was great. We were great friends towards the end. Um we liked each other a lot.
SPEAKER_04And so you you you come out on the other end of this journey, he's he's a meant he's so overtly proud of you, you know. He couldn't be more happy. Look at my daughter, look what she's done.
SPEAKER_00And I think in some way it sort of atoned for something for him. In he he wasn't a psychologically sophisticated person, but deep in his unconscious somewhere, the fact that I had done that somehow helped him with the idea perhaps of having been a bad father.
SPEAKER_04Right, right. Like maybe I wasn't so bad.
SPEAKER_00Maybe I wasn't such an idiot.
SPEAKER_04And and then now he sees you more as an adult. He'd done this incredible feat. Is it just because of who he was and where he was from, just even talking about your mother was inconceivable?
SPEAKER_00She's never mentioned again. Never. Never. Not a word.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, it really is sign of changing times. Truly. Yeah. You make this observation of Australia, which is colonial circumstance made the idea of an upper class redundant. There weren't enough of them to go around. And this is on the other side of talking about who your father was and how he was and your mother was and how she was. And for me, having grown up in Australia, oh by the way, a suburb called Malabar, which is an ice synchronicity. Gosh. But I I can't recognise that at all, you know. And that could just be because I'm from Sydney, not the country. But at least it feels like it's a it's a it's a very different Australia, the one you grew up into the one I grew up in.
SPEAKER_00It is it was a different Australia. And it we have to remember the effect of the Second World War. The men who came back, you know, w how how uh what they'd seen and been through. Um there wasn't the sort of understanding of uh post-what is it called?
SPEAKER_04Post-traumatic stress.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, post-traumatic stress. Um for women it was a difficult era because they'd got some freedom during the war, because they'd taken the jobs that the men had left open. And then as soon as the men came back, bang, that was it.
SPEAKER_04Total domesticity is no other option.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely, and you can see it in all the magazines, the women's magazines of that time, how suddenly the duty of a woman was to be a housewife and have children. Um, so if you were a complicated woman who wanted a life, it was very difficult. And it must have been difficult for the men as well. Um so that war we forget what wars do. Um so yeah, the 50s were marked by that. And then the 60s happened and sort of broke all of that apart. How things changed so quickly. So quickly. Yeah. I think young men now are just gorgeous.
SPEAKER_04In what aspect?
SPEAKER_00Well, there's a kind of awareness. They're softer, they seem to be more and this one shouldn't make these huge generalizations. Obviously.
SPEAKER_04You can paint with a broad brush, there's exceptions everywhere.
SPEAKER_00Um boy, and then you look at the incels and all that ghastly sort of manosphere and so on, which is pretty terrifying. But you know, the young men I meet, let's say, I find them kind. They're kind to me. Um, you know, this older woman in my era, we didn't we were horrible about older people.
SPEAKER_04Um like just put them over there.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, just um so yeah, a lot has changed, and they're more sensitive, more aware of their how complex life is and their, you know, how difficult it is to find a the right place in the world, you know? They have to think.
SPEAKER_04You spoke um really candidly about the decision to not have children. I think you were in your thirties when you made that decision.
SPEAKER_00Pretty much, yeah.
SPEAKER_04And um have there you you have a close relationship with your nieces and presumably friends, kids, and so forth. Uh but but is there a part of you that regrets not having found maybe with Norendra or such as like create a new life?
SPEAKER_00No, I I'm sort of not given to regret, you know, those choices, whether they're chance or whether you know, whether they were free will or not free will. They are they exist. You've made them already. Um so no, I don't regret it. And also, how do I, you know, part of that decision was understanding that I was still a child myself in many ways. I needed to, you know, if I was going to have a child, I would have to be so strong because the responsibility of bringing an entity into this universe, what could be more important than that? And people treat it so lightly, they just think, oh well, I'm bored today, I'll have a baby. You know, uh it just astonishes me. Um so I was very aware of that, the responsibility of being a good parent, of having the financial resources, of having the emotional resources, of having or not having a partner, what that would mean, having a family structure that you could where you could get help. Um so I was very aware that that would be a huge thing to do. But also all my friends were not having children at that particular era again, um, and the the the thought was can you be an artist and a mother? Is it possible to do those two things or not? Um, and many us many of us decided not. Um so I think it's those those decisions are still extremely difficult and probably always will be.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, there's a quote Colin Thhubron said a few weeks ago when I interviewed him because he as well never had any children. And he said uh uh the enemy of creativity is the pram.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Well it's it it's a lot of hard work and devoted work. Um and I think sometimes if you want to be an artist you have to pay a kind of bill.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I'm I'm terrified at the at that the idea of taking on that huge responsibility. Um therefore am I selfish for thinking maybe I don't want to, you know?
SPEAKER_00I don't think you're selfish at all. It's a deep, deep decision. Um the most important one you'll ever make because that creature is going to have to live a life.
SPEAKER_04And you're pretty responsible for how it turns out. Yeah. Oh, that's that's great. That leads us to nature versus nurture.
SPEAKER_02Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_04Uh which I know is a one of your favourite topics, but I I couldn't I couldn't definitively find actually where do you come down on it.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely in the middle.
SPEAKER_01That's no good.
SPEAKER_00Well, I think you know, genetics obviously plays some part. We don't know how big a part. Um nurture obviously plays a big part. How those two things interrelate we still don't know really, but obviously they're both terribly important into how a person turns out. I do think um people are born with different sorts of brains, um, different sorts of um sort of inherited characteristics of character, all those things. But then the world impinges on that and moulds that. Um so when I say I'm in the middle, it is that relationship between nature and nurture that creates and chance, you know, just chance.
SPEAKER_04And but chance is the nature, the nurture side of it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_04Well, I suppose it's also the nature, of course it is. You're born with a specific inclination, fragilities and strengths. Yeah. But I'm sure you've observed even between you and your sister, but I can observe between me and my brothers or my wife's siblings, very similar environments. Friends is a big one that differs.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_04But the home and the values, yeah, and how you spend most nights and most weekends, yeah, yet dramatically different outcomes.
SPEAKER_00Very much so.
SPEAKER_04And makes me think that it's maybe like a 90-10 split or something. You can't dismiss nurture, obviously. No, but then maybe I don't know, am I just trying to take full credit for how I become? You know, because uh that's yeah. Well, if it's a wobbly uh stage to to sort of stand up.
SPEAKER_00It is. I tend to think we're less self-constructed than we want to believe, you know.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. But in specifically from a neuroscientific perspective, since this is a great interest of yours and you've done as much as you can to understand how does that all work.
SPEAKER_00Well, it keeps changing too, of course. I mean, new as new research comes. comes in. And I do try to follow it as much as I can. I love science and I read a hell of a lot. So I'm fairly literate for an amateur. But really school's still very much out on all this stuff. It's new, it's um a dramatic field. You know the study of consciousness, it's extraordinary and how it's changed over the last just even the last decade. There's a lot of new ways of thinking about it and looking at it and yeah, fascinating.
SPEAKER_04Narendra, the the great love of your life. Twenty, thirty years you were together?
SPEAKER_00Pretty much, twenty-five, something like that, yeah.
SPEAKER_04And and he was from some type of aristocracy would you call it feudal feudal.
SPEAKER_00Feudal aristocracy. They were called Rajputs. They were the ruling um they were the rulers of Rajasthan. He was raised in a huge cake like castle. But he was a most unusual man because he escaped in many ways that context, that world, and became well he was always noble a noble but he in many ways was also self-made and he became a politician a Congress politician sort of liberal leftish although India is such a different context you can't really label it like that. He was quite a successful politician but a bit of a maverick um an immensely astute person. He was infallible in his judgments of people. Right. Just infallible.
SPEAKER_04Can you give any examples of that?
SPEAKER_00Honestly it he he was never wrong. Well I alright I'll I will tell you one he uh he met one of my friends very very close friend and afterwards he was very quiet so I knew something was going on and I said so what what and he said you be careful there and it was the only real sort of argument fight we'd ever had um I said you don't know what you're talking about blah blah and he said you are vulnerable because you don't have a jealous heart but that woman has a jealous heart and she wants what you have you be careful a decade later absolutely correct. Yeah well what is it that he would see in people I don't know I think it was the sort of he'd had quite a difficult childhood so he'd had he'd had to watch people and duck and weave um and he was a damn good politician and you have to be a good judge of character there. Or how to judge what people are really after. He was infallible. And he was uh Hinduist Hindu yes he uh well yes Hindu born Hindu um but part of his politics was taking the side of uh minority Muslims who were having a hard time um by Hindu fundamentalists uh sort of fascists Hindu fascists um so his constituency he sort of was looking after in many ways uh his Muslim constituents so he was visiting a lot of Sufi shrines and talking to the old Sufis and he at the end of his life when he was he himself was quite vulnerable and quite ill he converted converted to Islam and or to Sufism I guess you'd say um and that became very important to him it's part of him that I never could share or understand his religiosity because it all looked the same to me but it obviously it was very important to him. Whether it helped him or hindered him I've really no idea.
SPEAKER_04You write that he ended up becoming quite fundamentalist in the new faith.
SPEAKER_00No no he wasn't ever fundamentalist not at all and the Sufis are generally speaking not not um hard line like that but it was important to him. Okay okay and it meant that he was in a territory where I couldn't follow him uh I simply didn't get it but I knew it but you know it was important to him so that was fine with me.
SPEAKER_04And he ended up rubbing up against the BJP which is the Hindu Nationalist Party that Narendra Modi's in charge of currently in charge in India.
SPEAKER_00Correct. And it got violent uh with them at some stage oh it's always been you know they're card carrying fascists the RSS which is what the BJP grew out of were literally fascists you know they thought Hitler was pretty terrific um it's a I think a tragedy for India but there you are.
SPEAKER_04How do you make sense of that now considering India is if not the certainly among the future global economies and their four populations and their four cultural influences globally?
SPEAKER_00Yeah well we will see um he's still immensely popular um from my point of view what he's done is not just uh um augment um communalism the the um uh friction between Hindus and Muslims but he's uh sort of taken away a particular kind of Indian sweetness that was so generous to the outsider that was so incorporating of otherness um it was one of the lovely things about India that embracing and incorporating and respect for otherness um and I see that sort of eroding towards more of a national well nationalism a hind Hindu specific Hindu nationalism um where the Hindus are on top and everyone you know Christians and Isla and Muslims and all you other mob can get lost.
SPEAKER_04Get lost yeah when was the last time you were in India?
SPEAKER_00I was there when COVID started okay and um uh I haven't been back but I'll go back next year and see my friends and my old staff who I love. Mm-hmm so you still are welcome back there like family this is the house in the Hilamate no I don't go back there because when Narendra died the family sort of went into this it was a feudal family so they wanted property and I backed out I don't want to be part of that but I did want to protect my staff and I still keep in contact with them. So not the family but I keep in touch with the staff.
SPEAKER_04And did you and Narendra ever discuss getting married?
SPEAKER_00We did but it didn't seem my era didn't sort of think marriage was necessary um but also we sort of never got around to it I suppose it was kind of that because our lives were very complicated. You know it was our lives existed between two countries and and about five different properties so we were very busy people. And um so yeah we spoke about it but never just sort of didn't happen. Did you ever participate in his politics I did in front of people offer ideas no absolutely not he protected me from all of that really and um protected me from family politics um in a way in a way I was separated out from a lot of his territory let's say for my own good um and that made life a lot easier.
SPEAKER_04Yeah and it was 30 years or something your relationship yeah yeah it it is really hard for me to imagine like what is a 30 year relationship across five properties in two countries you you said you spoke on the phone every day but am I constantly on a plane? Like is that how it works?
SPEAKER_00Well it was um I think of it think of it as quite an aristocratic marriage in the sense that I don't think we ever spent longer than three consecutive weeks together in all that time. There was a lot of travelling obviously there was a lot of um interference a lot of pressure he was under tremendous pressure you know life threatening pressure um I was constantly going back to London having to go back to London um so it was complicated and um both of us under a lot of stress really because of that structure but yeah pretty much every morning we were on the phone and we didn't particularly say anything much it was more like birds talking to each other you know I'm here yes you're there yes that's it yeah it's a really beautiful way to describe it just checking in yeah we're both still here all right take it easy yeah this is getting towards the end okay and definitely sappy so forgive me if it is but I feel you're doing fine so far.
SPEAKER_04I feel like I want to ask it anyway. Yeah the title is Unfinished Woman can you ever really be a finished person? There's there's Jung's idea of individuation where and also Nietzsche's idea of becoming who you are and the central point of both of those you know philosophical ideas is that you never actually do reach the end. No the the peak is always out of view the horizon is always over the next hill but it's simply just getting as close to it as possible is is the life well lived to a degree are you leaning into anything like that with a title like unfinished woman? Yes. Was that very sappy?
SPEAKER_00No it's not sappy at all it's um yes I mean the title's ambiguous and it's meant to be I am unfinished and I believe we're not finished till we're dead um and of course my mother was unfinished um being female in the world is a sort of unfinished project um so yes we're we are I think of us as gerunds rather than nouns. Geronds what's a gerund a gerund is okay running sitting thinking we is is movement.
SPEAKER_04Okay.
SPEAKER_00Um so instead of um motion not static. Yes yes we're not a thing we're we're more a process than a thing.
SPEAKER_04Right oh nice we are processes not things they're allowing for all the change of that motion. Yeah you you've lived all over the map this kind of leans it leans leads into it a little bit and tell me whether you think this is the case or not but I think one of the great maybe unsung details behind being able to just go somewhere new when no one knows you. You have no friends there? Yeah is that not in a psychopathic way but you can in a sense reinvent yourself. Definitely it's not like your personality changes but at least there is zero baggage of all the people who knew you from where you just came and and it's very sort of exciting and very confronting. Yeah but but also maybe liberating too because you realize there are these parts of myself which will always remain under a rock because all the behavior I've done accumulated with all these people who know me that have this idea for who Ryan is and there's maybe Ryan wouldn't do something Ryan isn't that type of person.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_04And if you think about actually from an evolutionary perspective it it's actually really rare to get that opportunity to immerse in a different totally different when no one knows it because it'd be extremely dangerous at most points in history and there are so many other barriers hanging at you know anyway so having relocated do do you agree with that?
SPEAKER_00Yes I think in my case the reason for travelling the way I have in that sort of complete immersion sort of letting go of everything behind and just immersing in in another culture is to is to test my biases the sort of bias that you automatically have from your background from your culture from everything around you and if you're in some place that's completely different has different values different ways of perceiving the world all of that all of those assumptions that you've carried as being normal or correct or right are put to the test and that's a very good reason for traveling but I think the way we travel now that part of it is kind of gone it's less about that and more about making elsewhere a place where you can take everything with you.
SPEAKER_04That observation you make at the end like how we travel now but but even if you travel back then it's more the fact that you're doing it totally alone and you're doing it with no bridges.
SPEAKER_00No bridges.
SPEAKER_04You're there who knows how long who knows where I'll be yeah like that type of total immersion I I think is historically uncommon.
SPEAKER_00Probably probably yes probably but then I've always done that you know whether it was being in the criminal club or it's that investigation of otherness and possibly because I didn't have so a particularly strong sense of myself that I was able to do that maybe I don't know but it certainly is how I can see that it has been a pattern of this immersion in otherness um out of a profound curiosity sort of curiosity that's that has saved me really um and this wish to get further and further and further to something true.
SPEAKER_04Did you ever come close to that answer?
SPEAKER_00No still still heading in that direction. Did it make you more empathetic and maybe less judgmental just across the board seeing how different people definitely but did it then harden your own idea for what a life well lived is I don't know what a life well lived is it depends on the person. Right you know you can have someone who's never shifted out of out of a village and but and has raised children and and dug in the dirt and and it could have been a magnificent life.
SPEAKER_04Totally totally if science allowed you to live say a hundred years more and you have all the physical vigour that you could hope for where would you want to go certainly not Mars.
SPEAKER_00No okay well of course in a hundred years it'll all be different so I'd simply be in another place it would be another place.
SPEAKER_04No but I mean right now you're guaranteed a hundred more years well there's where would I like to go?
SPEAKER_00I'd certainly go back to India um I'm very interested in Greenland and not just because Trump wants to buy it. Yeah there's a lot going on that's a different strike. Yeah really um there's so much sort of global stuff going on there. And of course I have great sympathy for the Inuit um I'd like to get to know the Samis um I'd definitely go back to Tibet. Right. Yeah you said that was the most beautiful place I think it's the most beautiful place I've ever been just stunning and the people stunningly beautiful God um probably a very sad place now but um you know things change where else I don't know sort of anywhere everywhere but as I say in a hundred years if I sit still in this house everything will be different. So in a sense I will have travelled anyway. Yeah the Melbourne sprawl would have made it out exactly yeah exactly I really tried figuring out whether you'd ever done anything with the Berber people or with the Bedouin no it just strikes me as not too brand you because obviously that's and in the antithesis to everything we've been saying but camels, nomadic people desert camels are completely um secondary it's the nomadism that I'm interested in the way that move moving that kind of moving through the world makes for different qualities so for example nomads tend to value knowledge above material possessions they can't carry many material possessions but they have to know a lot if they're going to survive they have to know their environment very well they have to be good diplomats because they're constantly dealing with otherness they have to hang together and look after each other all of those sorts of values and from my experience small experience really of being with those sorts of cultures it is like that their values tend to be centered around knowledge systems but tend to be less materialistic or less consumer driven.
SPEAKER_04So their values are different if you start building big edifices do you inevitably become consumering? How do you mean not quite sure the the opposite of that observation that the nomadic people will value knowledge value knowledge above consuming because they just simply can't carry it.
SPEAKER_00Exactly but then if we you know get off a ship and start building in Sydney harbour and are rooted there you know sleep there every night start putting things around our house like it it it does consumerism become inevitable at that stage it's too complicated a question because consumer is consumerism has gone through so many phases so you know if you want to begin with agriculture suddenly there's this change where uh grain has to be stored and protected. have to have a standing army. You have to set up a system of a mercantile system. So there's these huge fundamental changes. Does materialism or consumerism begin there? Well sort of, yeah. It's more complicated than that, but um certainly the sort of storage of things and being sedentary does make a big difference. And then you know you come through these periods of countries forming and nation building and technology changing and industrial revolution and now the digital revolution these and the rise of capitalism and you know these are huge factors in how we're all controlled and manipulated. And these systems are built that we don't seem to be able to get out of. And obviously they're very destructive systems. And how we'll survive that well we just don't know.
SPEAKER_04Robin almost every interview I've done I've asked some variation of what the role of serendipity has been in their lives. So two quotes from you one from Trax there are some moments in your life that are like pivots and then from Unfinished woman I seem to have an unusually fateful life. Coincidences have produced enormous effects. And so the theme has run throughout this interview but nonetheless I want to ask you directly how you make sense of the role that serendipity has played in your life sort of everything.
SPEAKER_00Chance has thrown me extraordinary opportunities and because I have a particular temperament and character I've tended to leap into those opportunities fairly blindly and just trusted that I'll make my way. I think we have much less free will than we give ourselves credit for. And how we react to that is where there may be some free will maybe not.
SPEAKER_04And if we think of great moments of serendipity Rick's photos taking off you meeting Narendra you know it's all of it the uh life can be understood backwards right but but it must be lived forwards there's no telling actually of the infinite possibilities you know which route we're going to end up in truly truly well look Robin I've been you've been rather way too generous with your time with me. Thank you for inviting me down here. It's been a pleasure Ryan really thank you and it's cool to see Diggity number two has been napping this entire time behaved. But really thank you so much.
SPEAKER_00Thank you.