Life & Wisdom Quote by Catherine Helen Spence

Boosterism rarely sounds more innocuous than in Spence's phrasing: a newspaper issue, a “glowing account,” a tidy list of climate and resources, capped with “sound principles.” It reads like civic housekeeping. That’s the point. By treating a speculative colony as already coherent and virtuous - “the province that was to be” - the language performs a kind of bureaucratic magic trick: it turns aspiration into inevitability.

The intent is promotional, but not merely commercial. Printing “in London” matters: the narrative of South Australia is being authored at the imperial center, then shipped outward as a ready-made identity. The colony arrives twice - once as ink and persuasion, then as settlement. “Glowing” signals a sales pitch calibrated for investors, emigrants, and moral reformers, the audience most likely to be swayed by reassurance that this new place is not just profitable but properly organized.

The subtext sits in the moral tone of “sound principles.” Climate and resources are empirical claims; principles are a promise about social order. Spence, writing as someone deeply attuned to the mechanics of reform and institutions, exposes how colonization marketed itself as ethical design: not a scramble, but a planned society. The smoothness is strategic. It omits the mess: who is displaced, who governs, who benefits, whose “principles” count. In that omission, the quote captures colonial modernity’s favorite move - presenting ideology as common sense, and conquest as administration.