![]() ![]() Davidson couches her memoir as an exploration narrative and treats the desert as a ‘lived space’ which she ‘writes home’ having learned how to ‘be’ in it, and so to ‘recover’ the garden in the desert. ![]() ![]() Using Keith Garebian’s distinction between ‘desert’ and ‘garden’ we examine how these explorers find and respond to ‘the garden in the desert’. In doing so we challenge Tom Lynch’s reading of the two texts as ‘traversals’ which portray the desert as ‘alien, hostile and undifferentiated void’. Drawing on theory of dirt developed by material ecocritic Helen Sullivan and by philosopher Olli Lagerspetz we demonstrate that the narratives of their travels show them engaged in transformative encounters with the Australian desert. The 2019 Association for the Study of Australian Literature Conference took as its theme the subject of ‘dirt’, and inspired this paper which examines the ‘journeys into dirt’ by explorer figures in Patrick White’s 1957 novel Voss and Robyn Davidson’s 1980 memoir Tracks. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution,Īnd reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. ‘Journeys into Dirt’ in Robyn Davidson’s Tracks (1980) and Patrick White’s Voss (1957) & Hooper, M., 2022, ‘“Journeys into Dirt’’ in Robyn Davidson’s Tracks (1980) and Patrick White’s Voss (1957)’, Literator 43(1), a1806. ![]()
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