Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Hughes

Transportation turns psychology into policy. Hughes takes Freud's neat idea of sublimation - converting base impulses into socially acceptable ones - and makes it brutally concrete: the state doesn't transform its violence, it ships it. In a single move, "made sublimation literal" frames colonization as a kind of moral accounting trick. The metropole keeps its hands clean by exporting the messy parts of itself, and then congratulates itself on civility.

"Transportation" carries a double charge in the Anglosphere: the penal practice of exiling convicts to colonies (Australia looms) and the broader logistical miracle of empire, the ability to move bodies, labor, and pain across oceans. Hughes, the great anti-romantic of art and national myth, is puncturing the pastoral story of settlement. The verb "conveyed" is chillingly polite, like a shipping manifest. Evil isn't defeated or redeemed; it's handled, packaged, routed.

"Another world" is doing quiet work too. It's geographic distance, sure, but also a moral fantasy: if suffering happens far away, it can be treated as a different reality, outside the ethical weather of London. The subtext is about denial as infrastructure. Empire doesn't just seize land; it reorganizes conscience. You can have Enlightenment rhetoric at home while building a carceral society abroad, because the violence has been made to look like administration.

Hughes's intent is surgical cynicism: to show that modernity's progress narratives often depend on a hidden commute of cruelty. The line lands because it compresses an entire imperial psychology into the language of transport and therapy - civilization as an alibi with shipping routes.