Tracks: One Woman's Journey Across 1,700 Miles of Australian Outback

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. This desert belongs to another ‘now’ and it’s foolish to compare them.

Wherever there is pressure to conform (one person’s conformity is often in the interests of another person’s power), there is a requirement to resist. Of course I did not mean that people should drop what they were doing and head for the wilder places, certainly not that they should copy what I did. I meant that one can choose adventure in the most

A few of Rick Smolan’s pictures are included in this edition too. I love them unreservedly now. They may have supplanted true memory, but aren’t they wonderful?

The two important things that I did learn were that 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. And I knew even then that I would forget them time and time again and would have to go back and repeat those words that had become mean

what’s true in one place is not necessarily true in another.

Because if people started living out their fantasies, and refusing to accept the fruitless boredom that is offered them as normality, they would become hard to control.

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.

Life’s so joyous, so sad, so ephemeral, so crazy, so meaningless, so goddamn funny.

Words are the memory twitching after the reality of the dance …