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    Short Black 11 No Fixed Address
    Short Black 11 No Fixed Address
    Short Black 11 No Fixed Address
    Ebook49 pages38 minutes

    Short Black 11 No Fixed Address

    By Robyn Davidson

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    About this ebook

    In every religion I can think of, there exists some variation on the theme of abandoning the settled life and walking one's way to godliness. The Hindu Sadhu, leaving behind family and wealth to live as a beggar; the pilgrims of Compostela walking away their sins; the circumambulators of the Buddhist kora; the Hajj. What could this ritual journeying be but symbolic, idealised versions of the foraging life? By taking to the road we free ourselves of baggage, both physical and psychological. We walk back to our original condition, to our best selves.

    After many thousands of years, the nomads are disappearing, swept away by modernity. Robyn Davidson has spent a good part of her life with nomadic cultures. In this fascinating and moving essay she evokes a vanishing way of life, and notes a paradox: that even as classical nomads are disappearing, hypermobility has become the hallmark of contemporary life. In a time of environmental peril, she argues, the nomadic way with nature still offers valuable lessons. No Fixed Address is part lament, part evocation and part exhilarating speculative journey.

    Short Blacks are gems of recent Australian writing – brisk reads that quicken the pulse and stimulate the mind

    Robyn Davidson is an award-winning writer who has travelled and published widely. Her books include Tracks, Desert Places, Quarterly Essay 24: No Fixed Address: Nomads and the Future of the Planet and, as editor, The Picador Book of Journeys and The Best Australian Essays 2009. Her essays have appeared in Granta, the Monthly, the Bulletin and Griffith Review, amongst others.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBlack Inc. Books
    Release dateSep 23, 2015
    ISBN9781925203578
    Short Black 11 No Fixed Address
    Author

    Robyn Davidson

    Robyn Davidson was born on a cattle property in Queensland. She moved to Sydney in the late Sixties, then returned to study in Brisbane before going to Alice Springs to prepare for her journey across the Australian desert. Davidson's first book Tracks, her account of this crossing, was an international sensation, and was adapted for a film starring Mia Wasikowska and Adam Driver. She has travelled extensively, and has lived in London, New York and India. In the early 1990s Davidson migrated with and wrote about nomads in north-west India. She is now based in regional Victoria, but spends some time each year in India.

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      Book preview

      Short Black 11 No Fixed Address - Robyn Davidson

      Geographic.

      INDIAN HIMALAYAS

      The house sits at seven thousand feet. To the south-west, just visible through a gap in the hills which are like stacked slices of ever paler blue glass, is the Gangetic plain, under a pall of dust. To the north-east, the rampart of rock and ice that is the Himalayas proper, on the other side of which lies Tibet. To reach the house from the nearest road, one must climb through three thousand feet of Himalayan oak forest, along a rough path. One must hire ponies or men to carry all the luggage and provisions up to the house.

      I love this place and would like to be buried here.

      When I say this place, of course I don’t just mean the house and its setting. I mean the people who live around me, some of whom work for me as servants, gardeners, stonemasons, porters and so on. I provide one of the very few opportunities for employment in these hills.

      Most of the original oak from this area – the Kumaon – was taken out by the British during the world wars. They replaced it with introduced pine which dries out the soil and inhibits the seeding of native species. The four hundred acres on which I live is re-growth native oak, and one of the few patches of it in the Kumaon region. Every time I drive from the railhead to the village below, on my way back here from Australia or London, I notice another hillside thinned of timber, another patch of forest uprooted to make a tiny terraced field, another landslide on these geologically new, precipitous inclines.

      The peasants are wholly aware that they are responsible for their forest disappearing, for their water disappearing, but they have no choice. If they do not chop wood, how will they cook and stay warm? If they do not carve out new fields from the forest, what will their sons do? As it is, many have to go to towns and cities to find work. If they do not have several children, who will take care of them when they are old, or provide the labour needed when the crops are ready? Many children die, after all. If they do not lop the trees for feed for their animals, or allow them to graze in the forest, the animals will starve. If they do not snare the leopards, or poison them, the leopards will take their animals or, worse still, their children. With the loss of forest goes

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