Tracks

Tiny cinema. Although the tickets are numbered, you can sit where you like, the audience is so sparse.
Opening images of a waif, a child in a yellow dress, walking. You see her from behind as she walks before you. The camera – and your eyes – follow her tracks.
The remainder of the slow movie is much the same: the waif, now of adult years, walks and the watcher follows her tracks. “Tracks” is the name of the movie and the name of Robyn Davidson’s book that preceded it by some decades.

The adult waif informs unbelieving Centralians, “I am going to walk to the ocean.” She speaks with an affect of subdued dourness. There is a tinge of defiance in anticipation of skepticism. The character is defensive, often enough sour. A person alone, she imagines she is independent of approval, of fellowship. Halfway from Alice to the WA coast she discovers, suddenly, violently, her human need. She practically rapes her astonished companion, the awkward photographer whose incursions into her aloneness she resents and finally accepts. Clumsy in his American optimism and belief and cheer, he saves her life by dropping jerry cans of water ahead on her route.

The movie has little dialogue. The silence speaks, the emptiness of the continent speaks. Motifs recur – sand as the tabula rasa of existence, fire as companion, water as vivifier. And the land, “country” in the language of her Aboriginal friends ( she makes a few friends, all of whom exist on the uttermost edges of Australian society. In the unexpected sweetness of the waif’s friends the movie approaches caricature. The traces of sentimentality are forgiven, offset as they are by the central character’s acerbity.)
The land, on the other hand, is eloquent and true. No matter how dramatic the image of hill, of shimmering emptiness, of spinifex, of purpling distant ridges, those images are true. The land – tracked in this way only by Davidson, the lost Leichhardt and Aborigines – is immutably itself.

This viewer, watching Davidson’s traverse, felt the flood of deep knowing, of coming home.
This land is the home of us whitefellas, a home known uniquely to relatively few, characters like Davidson, like Rod Moss, (artist and author of “The Hard Light of Day” and “One Thousand Cuts”). Their knowing is informed by the blackfellas who have shown them their home.

If you’ve missed this movie, don’t worry. Here for five minutes, gone tomorrow, I think it will never disappear. Like Davidson’s book the movie will be sought and valued so long as whitefellas are curious about the land, so long as we ponder our human aloneness.