Success Quote by Charles Sturt

Sturt’s line isn’t really about geography; it’s about contagion. New South Wales appears less as a place than as a moral climate, one where “bad example” moves like weather and “overwhelm[s]” even respectable families. That verb does a lot of work: it frames virtue as something fragile, easily flooded, and it quietly absolves the anxious reader of agency. If corruption is environmental, then fear becomes prudence, not prejudice.

The phrasing also smuggles in the class politics of the early colony. “Families” reads as code for the settler middle and aspiring gentry, people weighing emigration not only in pounds and prospects but in status. Sturt flatters their self-image by assuming they possess something worth protecting, while casting the surrounding society as a sink of “bad example” - a pointed colonial euphemism for convict origins, rough male culture, and the improvised social order of a penal settlement. He never needs to say “convicts”; the insinuation does the work, letting readers fill in the threat.

The kicker is the final calculus: “no success in life could compensate.” In a world selling the colony as opportunity, Sturt insists there are losses money can’t redeem. It’s a warning dressed as public-spirited counsel, but it also markets the speaker’s own credibility. The explorer positions himself as someone who has seen the frontier up close and can translate it into a moral ledger for anxious home audiences - converting uncertainty into a single, sharp objection.