Woman in the Wilderness: My Story of Love, Survival and Self-Discovery

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Well, it’s just that the wilderness makes me feel alive,’ ... ‘I would like to try it, to see if I can survive, to see if it transforms my mind and my body,’ (c) It’s good to remember that, no matter what we do to make our civilisation secure, this volcano here has the last word In my years of travel, I had never met such a bright-eyed, intelligent man who had so boldly traded his house and job for a life of adventure. The attraction I felt to him was not only because of his knowledge and wisdom, his zest for an adventurous life, his ability to live simply, or even his strong body; there was an undeniable spark of love between us present right from the beginning. It is a spark that has never gone away. (c) It is a trip that few experienced travellers would consider taking. Davidson, then 27 (she is now 73), was not an experienced traveller. It’s an astonishing tale about pursuing a crazy dream; a paean to nature and the Indigenous people she met en route; a celebration of sand, solitariness and the liberated hippy spirit. All that’s missing is motive. We don’t know why she was so determined to make the nine-month trek across the desert. Which is where Unfinished Woman comes in. Put the two books together, and it becomes apparent that the journey and her mother’s death were intimately connected, though not in a simple or explicable way. At the start of Unfinished Woman, Davidson’s father emerges as the main figure in her life – a larger-than-life Boys’ Own hero who had fought in wars, seen the world, and appeared to know the answers to the big questions. Her mother, meanwhile, was tiny in every sense – “four foot eleven, thin as a harebell, with shoulders like a perched bird,” Davidson writes. Home was a cattle station in Queensland, where Gwen was rendered invisible. She couldn’t compete with the stories of derring-do told by her husband. Gwen loved the arts and was a gifted pianist (as is Davidson, who turned down a music scholarship as a teenager), but that made little impression on her daughter. Gwen’s life was one of drudgery and benign submission.

That was the last thing I wanted to do. Nothing meant boredom, the dreaded void, horrible emptiness. Nothing was the unknown and I had discovered I was afraid of it - this was the fear I would have to face in the many weeks to come. We walked to the rhythm of the rolling waves. On our left were endless dunes; on our right the infinite ocean. Our surroundings didn’t change for days on end, yet we were amid the most ancient movement of the earth: the eternal flow of the tides, coming and going with the rhythm of the moon. The wind seemed to drive the salty mist on ahead of us. We could never reach it, yet we were always in it. Nothing ever stopped the sea or the waves, the wind or clouds or beach. None of it had stopped since the beginning of time. It kept moving, and it kept us moving. (c) Peter turned round and put my arms over his shoulders. ‘Now it’s just us,’ he said, embracing me. I took a deep breath. ‘I feel like we have finally come home.’ Peter nodded. ‘This is the world we were all born into.’ We had been living in the mountains for nearly two months now, but it felt like an eternity. During those first two weeks I had been so bored, but the wilderness had forced me to yield and gradually, day by day and week by week, time had slowed down. Walking over the hostile, hard ridges, where storm and wind were playing freely, gave me a feeling of insignificance that was strangely liberating. Only the present counted. It had a purifying effect and gently took away all the nonsense that didn’t really matter in the eyes of nature.Whilst Miriam’s act of living as a nomad isn’t radical in a global context, for a privileged, middle class, urbanised individual to choose that lifestyle is definitely a radical decision. Q: ‘The unexpected is often the most interesting!’ ‘Marvellous things that might change our entire life could happen to us, but you can’t plan for those things,’ (c)

Op den duur wordt het verhaal wel wat langdradig en gaat het in de herhaling. Meer spirituele ervaringen op meer prachtige plekken in Nieuw Zeeland. Bovendien is het ook niet bijzonder goed geschreven. It’s a kind of permanent yearning, but it also gives me the energy to keep aiming for an ever-moving goalpost.’ I told her about the day I had seen the chamois and realised that real beauty lies in being not becoming. It had made perfect sense in the wilderness, but I now saw that in civilisation everything was about comparison. What next? She says one thing is certain – she will never write about herself again, and she will be glad when she never has to talk about the book again and can get on with living. She has settled in a house she adores just outside Melbourne. “It was a stone dump and it’s now a rather beautiful stone dump. I wanted enough guest rooms for friends to stay, I wanted to make a garden, I wanted good coffee within five minutes, and I wanted to be able to see kangaroos within one minute. And I got it all.”

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Birds flew slowly above the surface of the water. Nothing seemed worried about the rain. Everything surrendered to whatever was coming. I had learned to look at fear and surrendered to my shadows on the wall. I wasn’t afraid to look again, and again. And the woman fled into the wilderness where she had a place prepared by God, so that there she might be nourished for one thousand two hundred and sixty days. OK. That makes twelve a day, a hundred and twenty for ten days, two hundred and forty for twenty days . . . So that’s about three hundred and sixty a month, or a thousand and eighty for three months.’ (c) I took his hand and looked out at the valley and forest all around us. Peter had read all of the old newspapers and magazines in the hut from cover to cover Oh, yes, a major adjustment.’ Peter nodded. ‘The mind needs to calm down. It could take days to ease into the rhythm of this place. Maybe weeks.’