Unfinished Woman: Robyn Davidson's memoir shines light on her mother

Robyn Davidson is adamant this is a question not worth asking, as life is never quite as deterministic as we'd like to think.

In her new memoir, Unfinished Woman, Davidson's mother takes her own life in the opening pages.

Davidson is just 11, and puts the episode firmly behind her.

But the book is an attempt to determine how much this event contributed to what amounts to an amazing, extraordinary, adventurous and glamorous life, that continues today.

Davidson, now 73, became famous in her 20s for trekking alone across Australia with her dog and four camels. The resulting book, Tracks, published in 1980, was a sensation (and later a movie starring Mia Wazikowska and Adam Driver). She had a long affair with a Rajasthani prince, and a shorter, more torrid affair with Salman Rushdie. As a teenager, she lived, briefly, on the streets of Sydney, worked as a life model and a croupier at a gambling den.

But it was when she began to approach the age her mother was when she died that the past began to nag at her. Writing this book was, she says, "a sort of a reckoning, I suppose. I don't want to sound too dramatic."

But the fact remained that she had been running from the past, consciously or not, her whole life.

"I think a lot of energy had gone into not thinking about the past, and frankly, that's a very good way to survive," she says.

"I just set my sights ahead, because what lay behind was very difficult and unpleasant. So it was better to bury it and not think about it. And I think that's a fair enough strategy, clearly."

Her mother left in a cloud of silence; suicide in 1950s Australia was shameful, a sin. No friends went to her funeral, and Davidson herself was kept away. And so, she stayed away, metaphorically speaking, striding forward, living her life and never looking back, until she couldn't ignore it anymore.

"I think often what can happen is that people get stuck in the past, and they sort of keep retraumatising themselves by raking around in the muck," she says.

"But in my case, it was a difficult time of life anyway. I was approaching the time at which my mum died. And I think mid-late 40s is always a time of wondering quite who you are in the world and what you're going to do and what it's all amounted to.

"I started thinking about the past and realising that I had never given my mother a single thought. From the day she died, it was like I just never thought about it again. No one talked about her, her name was never mentioned again.

"And I began slowly to realise that she'd been really, really expunged and blamed, and it was as if - and I mean 'as if' - she was restless and wanted me to speak for her. I guess if I'd lived in another century, I would have thought I was haunted."

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She has spent the last 20-odd years trying to write her mother's story, but has realised, along the way, that there simply isn't enough left of her to fill a whole book.

So the book morphed into a memoir of her own life - "or how her decisions have played out in my own fate".

Fate is the word because interestingly, Davidson has never had a real plan for her life.

"I didn't have a plan and I still don't have a plan!" she says, laughing.

"It's either very lucky or very unlucky, depending on how you look at it. But it's certainly always been just stepping into what presents itself, and trying to be not afraid, or ... mastering the fear, I guess."

And so, she has trekked across Australia, travelled with nomads in India, lived in a flat in Doris Lessing's garden in London, written more books. She has stayed resolutely unmarried. Is this, perhaps, an unconscious reaction against the life her mother eventually couldn't cope with?

"I certainly was very aware ... that I didn't want to be entrapped, or bullied, or restricted, or confined, and that's of course been a wonderful lucky thing for me, but it's also had its liabilities," she says.

All the while, her mother was somewhere in the back of her mind, until suddenly, she was at the front, albeit as "wisps and threads".

"I came to terms with the fact that my mother is completely gone," she says.

"She will never be present to me in the way that most people have their mothers.

"On the other hand, I suppose I feel I've done my best by her. I feel quite relieved in a way that I've made her a larger human than previously she'd been allowed to be in other people's stories."

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