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Tanami: on Foot across Australia's Desert Heart
300 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2003
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 4, 2023
I picked Tanami up at a used bookstore in Central Virginia based mostly on its cover art: a man in typical cutoff Crocodile Dundee garb leading a train of camels by hemp rope carefully through the spinifex and red soil of Central Australia. Read a world away by someone with no experience in desert trekking (or bush vernacular), Kelly's careful observations of the Tanami desert and his fellow travelers - human and camelid alike - do an excellent job of evoking a specific place on the map. The Tanami, known mostly for its stark emptiness, is nevertheless filled by Kelly with the history of three previous expeditions, snippets of camplife and the author's deep nostalgia for Australia's exploring days of yore.
However, Kelly's writing fails to strike the crucial balance met by all great adventure writers; that between internal, personal discovery and external observation. While stolid, ship's log observations can make for interesting reading in the face of true disaster (Ernest Shackleton, Steven Callahan), a trek as thoroughly successful as Kelly's requires a bit more personal insight to spice things up and keep the reader turning pages.
Pursuing a strict no-personal-talk policy with his sole traveling companion Andrew Harper, Kelly instead relies on his observations of the duo's camels and the desert as the backbone of his story. This strategy by itself wouldn't be an issue if Kelly had also worked his own personal growth and realizations into his sandy setting. Yet we never get more than cookie-cutter takeaways on the softness of modern life and Kelly's generalized nostalgia for earlier expeditions.
What in his life seeded this nostalgia in our author? What are Kelly's opinions on the ecological destruction of his country's interior by mining and cattle interests (on whose infrastructure he nevertheless relied upon for this journey)? What's up with his gendered fixation on the condition of the modern Australian male? Unfortunately, Kelly's strict camp policy of no-personal-talk seems to have seeped into his storytelling, leaving the reader to fill in the blanks.
However, Kelly's writing fails to strike the crucial balance met by all great adventure writers; that between internal, personal discovery and external observation. While stolid, ship's log observations can make for interesting reading in the face of true disaster (Ernest Shackleton, Steven Callahan), a trek as thoroughly successful as Kelly's requires a bit more personal insight to spice things up and keep the reader turning pages.
Pursuing a strict no-personal-talk policy with his sole traveling companion Andrew Harper, Kelly instead relies on his observations of the duo's camels and the desert as the backbone of his story. This strategy by itself wouldn't be an issue if Kelly had also worked his own personal growth and realizations into his sandy setting. Yet we never get more than cookie-cutter takeaways on the softness of modern life and Kelly's generalized nostalgia for earlier expeditions.
What in his life seeded this nostalgia in our author? What are Kelly's opinions on the ecological destruction of his country's interior by mining and cattle interests (on whose infrastructure he nevertheless relied upon for this journey)? What's up with his gendered fixation on the condition of the modern Australian male? Unfortunately, Kelly's strict camp policy of no-personal-talk seems to have seeped into his storytelling, leaving the reader to fill in the blanks.
November 2, 2017
Without a touch of insanity, our world would never have been discovered.
This is a well written story of a difficult undertaking, a journey of hardship and risk that I can only shake my head at.
I'm glad there are people mad enough to go on these adventures and share them so we can enjoy them from the comfort of our home.
It is a record of outback Australia that most people will never come near experiencing.
This is a well written story of a difficult undertaking, a journey of hardship and risk that I can only shake my head at.
I'm glad there are people mad enough to go on these adventures and share them so we can enjoy them from the comfort of our home.
It is a record of outback Australia that most people will never come near experiencing.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews