Wealth & Money Quote by Catherine Helen Spence

Spence is smuggling a radical claim into the calm language of autobiography: wealth is not a moral badge or a pile of money, it is a set of systems. By locating her education in the "early history of South Australia", she frames the colony as a live laboratory where abstract economics becomes painfully physical. "Production and exchange" aren’t textbook terms here; they’re the daily mechanics of survival in a place that needs to be built before it can prosper. The line’s authority comes from that phrase "for myself" - a quiet rebuke to theorists who talk about markets as if they float above geography, labor, and power.

The inventory that follows - machinery, roads, bridges, ports - is doing political work. It shifts attention from individual thrift to collective infrastructure, from private virtue to public investment. Spence’s list also maps the ideology of development: technology converts effort into output; roads and bridges convert isolation into circulation; ports convert local production into export revenue. She’s describing capitalism’s bloodstream, and you can hear a reformer’s impatience with any society that pretends wealth is created solely by "hard work" while neglecting the conduits that let work count.

Context matters: as a nineteenth-century Australian writer and social advocate, Spence is speaking from the edge of empire, where the promises of progress are constantly tested by distance and scarcity. The subtext is an argument for modern governance - build the shared tools first, and you change what a community is capable of.