Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles Sturt

Draw a straight line on a map and the continent starts behaving like an argument. Sturt is doing more than narrating a field observation; he is smuggling in a colonial way of seeing. The brisk conditional - "If we strike a line" - turns lived terrain into geometry, a space meant to be crossed, measured, and filed. It reads like administrative prose because exploration, in his moment, was administration in embryo: the first draft of routes, surveys, and claims.

The sentence’s quiet confidence is the tell. "Little change" isn’t just geological; it’s a promise of predictability. For an early-19th-century British explorer pushing inland from Sydney toward Wellington Valley (a frontier zone where missions and settler expansion would follow), continuity of "features" suggests continuity of opportunity: a legible landscape, stable enough for planning, extraction, and settlement. By foregrounding geology, Sturt also adopts the era’s preferred alibi for possession: science. The land is rendered as strata and forms, not as Country with names, histories, and custodianship already in place.

There’s a subtle rhetorical move, too: the collective "we" invites the reader into the expedition’s authority, making the act of drawing lines feel like common sense rather than intrusion. Sturt’s intent is to map and reassure; the subtext is that the interior can be known in the same terms as the coast. In that compression, you can hear an empire convincing itself that distance is merely a measurement problem.