Time & Perspective Quote by Charles Sturt

Sturt’s warning punctures the boosterish fantasy that empire sells to its own people: that a fresh colony equals a fresh start, clean and easy. Written from the vantage point of an explorer who had actually tried to make the land yield to European plans, the line reads less like moral preaching and more like risk disclosure. New South Wales wasn’t a blank page; it was a brutal logistics problem dressed up as opportunity.

The sentence is built to cool overheated expectations. “It is to be feared” strikes a politely official tone, but it’s also a rhetorical handbrake: your confidence is the danger. “Facility” and “certainty” target a specific emigrant mindset - the belief that distance alone produces advancement. Sturt counters with “recollect,” a word that assumes forgetfulness rather than ignorance, as if the emigrant already knows the truth but prefers the sales pitch.

The subtext is that the colony’s hardship is not a temporary inconvenience; it’s the governing condition. “Competency” is doing double duty: practical skill (farming, building, managing) and social standing. Sturt implies both are earned through grinding work, not granted by imperial geography. That’s a rebuke to the class dream that migration lets you skip the labor that would have defined you back home.

In context, this is frontier realism delivered in the language of Victorian self-improvement. It doesn’t challenge colonization’s premise; it disciplines its participants. The empire promises success; Sturt insists on sweat as the entrance fee.