Life & Wisdom Quote by Catherine Helen Spence

Adelaide gets pitched here as a paradox: simultaneously “dearest” and “cheapest,” a line that turns a settler city into a moral economy. Spence isn’t doing real estate math so much as values accounting. “Dearest” signals attachment, intimacy, a place worth loving; “cheapest” signals livability, the practical relief of making a life without the crushing costs (social and financial) that defined older, class-stratified cities. The sentence works because it collapses sentiment and thrift into the same claim, insisting they don’t have to be enemies.

Spence wrote from the position of a sharp-eyed reformer watching a young colony advertise itself as opportunity. South Australia was marketed as a planned, “free” settlement, less tainted by convict origins than other colonies, and Spence became one of its keen interpreters: an immigrant, a novelist, and later a public advocate for social and political reform. In that context, “cheapest” quietly argues for the colony’s promise of mobility: fewer entrenched hierarchies, more room to maneuver, a thinner layer of inherited privilege. It’s also an advertisement with a raised eyebrow. If Adelaide is “cheapest,” it’s because the city is still being built, culturally and materially; the bargain price is inseparable from the unfinished project.

The subtext is both pride and persuasion. Spence flatters the place while selling an ethic: a community can be affordable without being mean, and beloved without being decadent. That double bind - love measured in costs - is the modernity in the line.