Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles Of Australian Outback Quotes

"There are some moments in life that are like pivots around which your existence turns — small intuitive flashes, when you know you have done something correct for a change, when you think you are on the right track."

"It’s all very well, to set off on a train with no money telling yourself that you’re really quite a brave and adventurous person, and you’ll deal capably with things as they happen, but when you actually arrive at the other end with no one to meet and nowhere to go and nothing to sustain you but a lunatic idea that even you have no real faith in, it suddenly appears much more attractive to be at home on the kindly Queensland coast."

"Their camels, however, had found easy street — it was perfect country for them and they grew and prospered."

"The lunatic idea was, basically, to get myself the requisite number of wild camels from the bush and train them to carry my gear, then walk into and about the central desert area."

"It is difficult to sort out fact from fiction, fear from paranoia and goodies from baddies when you are new in a town but something was definitely queer about this one."

"They say paranoia attracts paranoia: certainly no one else I met ever had such a negative view of Alice Springs."

"To really come to grips with the Australian cult of misogyny, one has to plod back through all two hundred years of white Australia’s history."

"They are the most intelligent creatures I know except for dogs and I would give them an IQ rating roughly equivalent to eight-year-old children."

"No matter how much I discovered about them, there was always more to learn. They continued to surprise and fascinate me until the day I left my own four on the Indian Ocean coast."

"I decided to fly home to Queensland, to see Nancy, my closest friend. She was a yardstick against which I could measure what I had learnt and what I had felt."

"I have never uncovered anywhere the same bonds of friendship as I found in certain small sections of Australian society. It has something to do with the old code of mateship, and something to do with the fact that people have time to care for one another, and something to do with the fact that dissidents have had to stick together, and something to do with the fact that competition and achievement are not very important aspects of the culture, and something to do with a generosity of spirit that can afford to grow within that unique sense of traditionless space and potential."

"The trip home reinstated a faith in myself and what I was doing. I felt calm and positive and strong, and now, instead of the trip appearing out of character, instead of worrying about whether or not it was a pointless thing to do, I could see more clearly the reasons and the needs behind it."

"One really could act to change and control one’s life; and the procedure, the process, was its own reward."

"Before that moment, I had always supposed that loneliness was my enemy. I had seemed not to exist without people around me. But now I understood that I had always been a loner, and that this condition was a gift rather than something to be feared."

"I believe the subconscious always knows what is best. It is our conditioned, vastly overrated rational mind which screws everything up."

"So now, for the first time in my life, my aloneness was a treasure which I guarded like a jewel."

"I believe she actually pined away — lost her will to live."

"It dawned on me that I was procrastinating, pretending, play-acting, and that was the source of my discomfort. If everyone else believed I would eventually take the camels out into the desert, I did not."

"This debilitating fear, this recognition of the full potential of Kurt’s hatred of me, and the knowledge that Kurt could and would hurt me very badly if I displeased him enough, was the catalyst which transformed my vague misery and sense of defeat into an overwhelming reality."

"He knew what was important and what was not. His fighting urge came to an abrupt end one day when he was almost killed by a pack of irate camp dogs. He licked his wounds for a week, then, with the admirable wisdom of a dog who has lived long and experienced much, retired into a noble, graceful old age."

"One continues to learn things in life, then promptly forget them."

"Life was good and bountiful. Nothing else could go wrong, statistics were against it."

"Camels are home bodies. When they fixate on a place or an area, you can be 99 per cent sure that they will always try to get back to it."

"I had simply not allowed myself to think of the consequences, but had closed my eyes, jumped in, and before I knew where I was, it was impossible to renege."

"I think when you are truly stuck, when you have stood still in the same spot for too long, you throw a grenade in exactly the spot you were standing in, and jump, and pray."

"The secret of this business is that you must learn to love the rivet."

"Of all the things I had to cope with before and after the trip, this learning to make and fix things was the most excruciating."

"I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes, to down all the glory of that magnificent heaven."

"I wanted to fly in the unlimited blue of the morning."

"The great spirit had fled, leaving me to my own resources."

"Good season or no, the desert is no place for a dilettante."

"The desert is like a vast untended communal garden, the closest thing to earthly paradise I can imagine."

"This searching for and picking wild food is one of the most pleasant, calming pastimes I know."

"I had learnt about wild foods from Aboriginal friends in Alice Springs."

"When in doubt, follow your nose, trust your instincts, and don't rely on maps."

"The desert is bountiful and teeming with life in the good seasons."

"I was coming right back down to earth, where the desert was larger than I could comprehend."

"The last burning bridge back to my old self collapsed."

"All the tourists in the world could not destroy it, it was too immense, too forceful, too ancient to be corruptible."

"The indecipherable power of that rock had my heart racing."

"The camera does not lie. It lies like a pig in mud."

"My anger had set cold and hard. It felt like a fist in my chest."

"It rained cats and dogs, elephants and whales."

"Exhausted by the work and worry, exhausted by the anger, and exhausted by my thoughts, which went round and round in circles."

"The necessity to compromise. It set the real basis for an unlikely friendship."

"The point was that Dookie could not walk. He sat in the creekbed, miserable, and refused to move."

"It is amazing to me how human beings can remain calm, controlled and sensible on the surface, when internally they are cracking up, crumbling."

"I entered a new time, space, dimension. A thousand years fitted into a day and aeons into each step."

"The sky turned thick with glitter. It was very still. I slept."

"Everything around me was bursting with life and vibrance. The colours danced and glistened in the crisp dawn light."

"He was a dingo-dreaming man, and his links with the special places we passed gave him a kind of energy, a joy, a belonging."

"Time melted — became meaningless. I don’t think I have ever felt so good in my entire life."

"The land was not wild but tame, bountiful, benign, giving, as long as you knew how to see it, how to be part of it."

"I was rediscovering and getting to know people who were long since dead and forgotten."

"Capacity for survival may be the ability to be changed by environment."

"The self did not seem to be an entity living somewhere inside the skull, but a reaction between mind and stimulus."

"I must remember this when I get back. I must not fall into that trap again. I must let people see me as I am."

"I was nearly halfway along the Gunbarrel... I couldn’t know when it was because by then I had realized that in the desert time refused to structure itself."

"I am quite sure Diggity was more than a dog, or rather other than dog."

"There are very few humans with whom I could associate the word love as easily as I did with that wonderful little dog."

"The good Lord in his infinite wisdom gave us three things to make life bearable — hope, jokes, and dogs, but the greatest of these was dogs."

"I have slowly regained a sense of the niceties, but I think, I hope, that I will always see the obsession with social graces and female modesty for the perverted crippling insanity it really is."

"To be free is to learn, to test yourself constantly, to gamble. It is not safe."

"That love wanted the best possible for those you cared for even if that excluded yourself."

"The world is a dangerous place for little girls... And so she wastes so much of her energy, seeking to break those circuits."

"Courage had much less to do with it than sheer good luck and staying power."

"Friendship in certain subsections within Australia amounts almost to religion."

"You are as powerful and strong as you allow yourself to be, and that the most difficult part of any endeavour is taking the first step, making the first decision."

"The trip was easy. It was no more dangerous than crossing the street, or driving to the beach, or eating peanuts."

"It is over thirty years since I walked across half of Australia with my dear camels and dog. If I concentrate, I can retrieve flashes of a particular place, the affection I had for my animals, the happiness of walking into that transcendent landscape."

"The heart of the book, I think, is the moment at which that paring away allows for a different kind of consciousness to emerge."

"I wanted to shed burdens. To pare away what was unnecessary."

"Travelling with an old Aboriginal man, Mr Eddie, set me up for that change, and I hope it was not presumptuous of me to imagine that the new state of mind might be something similar to the way traditional Aboriginal people related to place."

"Sometimes I find these changes so upsetting that I never want to go to the desert again. Other times I think that the homesickness is for an experience that could in any case never be repeated, and for people and ways of thought whose rightful place is the past."