Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles Sturt

Farming implements are as cheap in Sydney as in England is the kind of line that pretends to be a price check and quietly functions as a pitch deck for empire.

Sturt, an explorer mapping inland Australia for a British audience, isn’t merely reporting a market quirk. He’s laundering the unfamiliar into the familiar. The sentence reassures prospective settlers, investors, and officials that the colony isn’t a precarious outpost where you pay a punitive premium for basic tools. It’s a place where the machinery of “improvement” - ploughs, harrows, the hardware of turning land into property and profit - is already normalized. Cheapness signals maturity: supply chains work, shipping is routine, merchants are in place, and the frontier is becoming legible in pounds and shillings.

The subtext is sharper. Implements don’t just cultivate soil; they enforce a worldview in which land exists to be worked, fenced, measured, and owned. By highlighting affordability, Sturt frames agricultural expansion as not only possible but sensible, even inevitable. The line minimizes risk and masks violence. No mention of whose land is being “improved,” or what Indigenous displacement costs; the only cost that matters here is the retail price of metal and timber.

Context matters: early colonial Australia was constantly trying to prove it was more than a penal station and more than a speculative gamble. Sturt’s calm equivalence - Sydney equals England, at least at the till - is rhetorical ballast. It sells the colony as a continuation of home, not a rupture from it, and it makes conquest sound like common sense shopping.