Motherhood Quote by Catherine Helen Spence

Spence’s sentence is doing the careful, double-edged work of colonial self-definition: reassuring Britain that the cord is still attached while quietly arguing that the real experiment is happening somewhere else. The phrase “expanding society” flatters the settler project as growth, not displacement. It’s progress with the messy parts edited out, a civic coming-of-age story that renders conquest as cultivation.

What makes the line rhetorically effective is its balancing act between deference and ambition. “Still feeling the bond to the motherland” borrows the language of family to soften political reality; the empire becomes a parent, not a power. But then Spence pivots: “eager to develop a perfect society.” That word “perfect” is utopian, almost brazen, and it signals the 19th-century reformer’s confidence that new institutions can be engineered in a “new” place. South Australia becomes a laboratory where old-world class hierarchies and sectarian constraints might be reconfigured, even surpassed.

“Land of our adoption” completes the moral makeover. Adoption suggests choice, affection, mutual belonging. It’s a warm metaphor that disguises the asymmetry of who got to do the adopting. In context, Spence - a prominent Australian writer and social reformer - is articulating the settler liberal dream: continuity with Britain’s legitimacy, paired with a forward-looking claim to build something cleaner and more rational. The subtext is nationalism in its polite phase, before it admits it wants to be fully grown.