I admit I watch a lot of Netflix. Mostly thrillers and mysteries. I tell myself it is to keep my languages up, so now I can say “Who is there?” or “Don’t move or I’ll shoot!” and numerous expletives fluently in French. I watch everything British that has actors with a Dame in front of their name or Idris Elba. Or midwives. I adore Scandinavian Noir because all the actors look like normal people (weight included) except they are all heroic when it come to saving Norway from Russian occupation. I watch everything directed by Mira Nair or Jane Campion, both masters of visual beauty and psychological complexity. And I watch Australian movies for their landscapes, longing to see it but refusing to sit on a plane to get there.

Which brings me to today’s subject in this week’s theme of people I’d like to have known.

I stumbled across a movie called Tracks – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qi7opVyt15Y which is visually achingly beautiful. The (true) story it tells is even more stunning: a 2.700 km trek through desert and bush crossing Australia on foot from the Northern Territory town Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean by a young woman, her dog and 4 camels, Robyn Davidson. She trained several years to work with wild camels before she set off. National Geographic was willing to finance some part of the journey in exchange for photographs in situ, so Davidson grudgingly accepted occasional company of a photographer who remains a lifelong friend; some parts of the journey happened with the help of an Aborigine guide who saved her life more than once. But mostly she sought solitude, working through a childhood loss by walking by herself for an eternity. Risking her life to be alone.

She later moved to the Himalayas with a man she met at some camel exchange in India. That was after an affair with Salmon Rushdie, who had sought her out after reading the book about the trek. (I find it irksome, by the way, that they always mention him in the context of women’s lovers – have you ever seen something about Rushdie which in passing mentioned he had a relationship with Davidson? Or for that matter, Marianne Wiggins, who wrote the scariest book of all times, John Dollar, that outdoes anything I ever read by Rushdie?) I’d ask her about courage.

Photographs are American stand-ins from Joshua Tree National Park.