Art & Creativity Quote by Robyn Davidson

There’s a neat brutality in Davidson’s assessment: she names a pinnacle, then refuses to romanticize what came after. By calling The Worst Journey in the World the “highest point,” she’s not just praising a classic of expedition literature; she’s implying the genre effectively peaked when it still had a plausible alibi. Early travel writing could present itself as hard-won testimony from the edge of the map. After that, “decline” isn’t just about craft. It’s about the collapse of a worldview that treated “the world out there” as available for discovery, description, and ownership.

The barb lands in her phrase “harking back,” which frames much contemporary travel writing as cosplay: writers borrowing the old 19th-century posture of the lone observer encountering the exotic, even though the conditions that made that posture legible (empire, blank spaces on maps, unequal mobility) haven’t disappeared so much as become harder to pretend are neutral. Davidson is signaling a moral and epistemic shift. The problem isn’t that you can’t travel, or can’t write beautifully about place. It’s that the omniscient, extractive voice - the narrator who arrives, interprets, and leaves with “meaning” - reads like an artifact of power.

Her “you just can’t do it anymore” is intentionally categorical, almost impatient. It’s a dare to the genre: either admit you’re writing from inside history’s mess (colonial legacies, tourism, climate, surveillance, global sameness), or stop pretending your book is a window onto an untouched “out there.”