Science Quote by William John Wills

A mild sentence with the bite of a field note: “I do not like Melbourne in its present state” lands less like a complaint than a diagnosis. Wills, a young scientist trained to observe, isn’t performing outrage; he’s registering conditions. The phrasing matters. “Do not like” is almost comically restrained, the kind of English understatement that lets a writer keep authority while hinting at something worse. And “in its present state” is a scalpel. It suggests change over time, deterioration, and the possibility of improvement, while refusing to sentimentalize the city itself. The problem isn’t Melbourne as an idea; it’s Melbourne as a lived, current environment.

The subtext is the familiar tension of boomtown modernity. Mid-19th-century Melbourne was swelling fast, flush with gold-rush energy, improvising infrastructure and social order on the fly. For a scientist, that kind of expansion reads in the air and water: dust, mud, crowding, noise, administrative chaos. Wills’s sentence carries the unease of someone who values systems and measurement encountering a place still being assembled.

Context sharpens the line’s quiet severity. Wills is best known for the Burke and Wills expedition, a venture defined by logistical strain, institutional hubris, and the harsh arithmetic of environment. Read against that life, his distaste for Melbourne “in its present state” sounds like a man already attuned to how quickly circumstance can turn hostile. The elegance is in the restraint: a small, civilized sentence that lets you feel the pressure building underneath.