The most worthless of junk mail is a picture postcard from a package tourist. It shows only that the sender feels temporary superiority has been achieved by getting away for a while. But all resort hotel swimming pools and beaches look boringly the same. Tahiti? Ibiza? Barley Cove? So what?
Robyn Davidson, who was born in Australia in 1950, is not the sort of person who travels to make the neighbours envious, and she is not the sort of travel writer whose work is disguised payment for unfree free trips. As she demonstrates in Journeys, an enthralling off-the-beaten-tracks anthology, "the literature of movement", as she calls travel writing, "covers a vastly more rich and complex range of experiences" than those usually chronicled "to accommodate a longing for the exotic, in an increasingly homogenised and trivialised world". Her own first successful travel book was about a journey with camels across an Australian desert. Publishers asked for more of the same. Ten years later, although she did not like being labelled, she acceded to their demands and spent a long time with Indian nomads, seasonally moving from pasture to pasture. She says she wanted to write "something resembling ethnography". But she could not live as a genuine nomad among nomads, because, inhabiting her own "post-industrial time", with access to modern transport and communication, she could slip out of her role whenever she chose.
"Both the experience and the attempt to describe it honestly," she writes, "confirmed my view that the accepted models of travel writing were compromised to such a degree that the best one could do was subvert a decadent genre."
According to her new jacket blurb, she "currently lives in Australia, London and India". People with multiple homelands are essentially homeless. Once an alien, always an alien.
So Davidson apparently sees the world supranationalistically. She is able to see farther and more clearly than a travel writer with a fixed, secure base from which brief forays are only holidays from reality. Unlike "commissioned traveloguers", contributors to her anthology "set out because of an inner compulsion to do so, or are driven by some sort of necessity, and their tales, therefore, have the power to reconnect us with the essential".
In her determination to eschew commonplace commercial frivolity, she has devoted a lot of space to the discomforts and dangers of the most difficult sorts of journeys in remote places and in extreme climates.
An aboriginal Australian tells how "the whitefellas" shot some of her people and forced others to flee from their ancestral lands. Joan Didion writes on government atrocities in El Salvador, Mary McCarthy on the bombing of Vietnam, George Orwell on the Spanish Civil War, Isabella Bird on the austerity of 19th-century puritan life in the American Rocky Mountains, Alexander William Kinglake on the Khamseen wind and the plague in Cairo, Estaban Montejo on a fugitive slave's "Life in the Forest", Joseph Conrad on how ships went missing in the Southern Ocean. And there is much more.
Memorably, there is a 39-page excerpt from Apsley Cherry-Garrard's description of "The Worst Journey in the World", staggering through Antarctic snow to deliver three penguins' eggs to London's Natural History Museum: "They talk of the heroism of dying - they little know - it would be so easy to die, a dose of morphia, a friendly crevasse, and blissful sleep. The trouble is to go on . . . "
By far the most horrific piece in the collection is Joanna Greenfield's account of being attacked by a hyena, a predator which likes to eat its victim piece by piece while it is still alive.
But the book is not without passages of relief. Gore Vidal reports lightly on a visit to Outer Mongolia, Hunter S. Thompson describes drug-induced hallucinations on the road to Las Vegas, and Edmund Wilson bitchily explains how the English upper class use rudeness to oppress their inferiors.
T.E. Lawrence recommends C. H. Doughty's Travels in Arabia Deserta as "a joy to read, as a great record of adventure and travel (perhaps the greatest in our language)". I recommend Robyn Davidson's Journeys as an anthology of literary excellence and a refreshing antidote to all those picture postcards from our friends.
Patrick Skene Catling is an author and critic