Wealth & Money Quote by Robyn Davidson

A quiet indictment is hiding inside Davidson's matter-of-fact phrasing: travel writing didn't dry up; it got re-shelved. By calling out a genre that has "moved into this commercial aspect of itself", she frames the shift as self-inflicted, not inevitable. "Moved" suggests drift, a slow surrender to market logic: listicles, influencer itineraries, aspirational consumption masquerading as narrative. The target isn't commerce per se, but what commerce rewards: speed, gloss, and repeatable desire.

Her sharpest move is bureaucratic and brilliant: "filed everywhere else except under travel". That's the whole critique in a library joke. The most bracing accounts of movement through the world haven't disappeared; they've been absorbed into memoir, nature writing, reportage, Indigenous literature, climate writing, even political nonfiction. Travel, as a label, has been narrowed into a product category, while the real work of encountering alterity, describing land honestly, and reckoning with power has migrated to genres that can hold moral complication.

Davidson's context matters. As the author of Tracks, she represents a tradition where travel is less about destinations than about endurance, solitude, and the ethics of passing through someone else's country. Her line reads like a defense of seriousness: that the literature of roads and deserts is still "extraordinarily rich", but you have to look where bookstores don't train you to look. The subtext is a warning: when a genre becomes a sales funnel, it starts mistaking movement for meaning.