Science Quote by William John Wills

The line lands with the quiet snap of a field note that accidentally reveals an empire. Wills, a scientist and explorer best known for the ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition, isn’t writing a love letter to Melbourne; he’s inventorying it. “Wonderfully altered” sounds like praise, but the praise is pointedly material. The city’s improvement is measured in “fair buildings” and prices, as if civic progress can be tallied like specimens.

That’s the subtext: Melbourne in the mid-19th century was a boomtown remade by the Victorian gold rush, a place where overnight wealth demanded architecture to match. Wills’s eye goes first to the built environment because buildings are the most legible proof of permanence. They’re also a colonial flex: stone and facades standing in for legitimacy on contested land. He doesn’t mention people, governance, or displacement; the social costs stay offstage. The sentence is a small example of how settler modernity talks about itself: not as conquest, but as “improvement.”

Then there’s the kicker: “things are a little cheaper.” It’s domestic, almost petty, which is precisely why it works. It punctures any grand narrative with the everyday economics of living in a rapidly expanding city. Cheaper goods signal stabilizing supply lines, maturing markets, the conversion of frontier chaos into routine. Wills registers “progress” the way a returning resident would: through what you can buy and what the streets look like. The cool understatement is doing ideological work, naturalizing a transformation that was anything but neutral.