Born in Miles, Queensland, she went to a girls' boarding school, and moved to Alice Springs in the 1970s.
After an exploration of the Northern Territory and Western Australia with her dog Diggity and some camels, she wrote a book about it called Tracks (Random House, 1980) The book had photos by Rick Smolan, who came on the trip because he had an assignment for National Geographic. Later he made it into a CD-ROM called From Alice to Ocean, one of the first interactive story-and-photo CDs even made for the general public.
In 1998, Davidson wrote Desert Places, a book about a nomadic tribe in India (the Rabari). This book was also lavishly illustrated.