'What does the first poetry in Australia, written by the Judge who declared the land terra nullius, tell us about the singular nature of colonialism here?
'On 24 February 1817, Barron Field sailed into Sydney Harbour on the convict transport Lord Melville to a ceremonial thirteen-gun salute. He was there as the new Judge of the Supreme Court of Civil Judicature in New South Wales - the highest legal authority in the turbulent colony. Energetic and gregarious, Field immediately set about impressing his vision of a future Australia as a liberal and prosperous nation. He courted the colony's leading figures, engaged in scientific research and even founded Australia's first bank. He also wrote poetry: in 1819, he published First Fruits of Australian Poetry, the first book of poems ever printed in the country. In England, Field had been the theatre critic for The Times, and a friend of such major Romantic writers as William Wordsworth, Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt. In New South Wales, he saw the chance to become a major figure himself…' (Publication summary)
'Thomas H. Ford and Justin Clemens’s Barron Field in New South Wales: The Poetics of Terra Nullius offers an important intervention in the historiography of settler-colonial Australia. Ford and Clemens have produced a highly original account of the complex contribution to Australian law, politics and poetics made by this “largely unacknowledged” (5) and pun-inducing figure—“a man with a pun for a name” (55)—introduced here as one of Australia’s founding fathers, in myriad, mutually constitutive ways.' (Introduction)
'My copy of Barron Field in New South Wales: The Poetics of Terra Nullius came adorned with a blue and white sticker from the Australian Booksellers Association, proclaiming the book as a ‘staff favourite’. Although a complex and demanding book, it is not hard to see its appeal for an Australian audience. Ford and Clemens offer a detailed analysis of the first collection of poetry published in Australia, Barron Field’s First Fruits of Australian Poetry (1819). Far from treating Field’s collection as a historical curiosity, the poetry serves as a launching pad for the authors’ wide-ranging and innovative discussion of the origins of colonial Australia and its fraught relationship with Australia’s Aboriginal people.' (Introduction)
'There is a place in Sydney called Inscription Point, where, at the busy juncture of flight paths and container shipping traffic, a brass tablet is set into a sandstone cliff. Thereabouts Captain Cook once cut the date – 1770 – and his ship’s name – HMS Endeavour – into a tree, and so in 1822 members of the loftily-named but very short-lived Philosophical Society of Australasia had the tablet installed to mark the spot. Today the tablet’s corroded words are virtually illegible, but its brisk edges stand out from the pocked and lunging sandstone rockface – a green square, a small abstraction in the landscape. ‘Here fix the tablet. This must be the place’ reads the more lasting memorial, a sonnet by the colonial poet and judge Barron Field. It would be reasonable to think that the unveiling of the tablet is what inspired Field’s poem – that would be the normal order of things. But Field wasn’t so incidental to the scene. The tablet was his pet project: he had commandeered the Philosophical Society to this end. So, Field created the occasion for his own poem, which is as much about Cook’s inscription (‘But where’s the tree with the ship’s wood-carv’d fame?’) as about the perpetuity of his tablet.' (Introduction)
'Literary study tends to be characterised by bipolar episodes, swinging between enjoyment and judgement. There is reading for pleasure and learning to be critical, or making up your mind about how good, bad, or indifferent a literary work is. This way of thinking about literature still pervades all levels of the cultural and social scenes where readers talk to one another. We discuss with our friends or communities whether we like a work of literature or not, but when things get formal or seminar-serious the conversation shifts to whether we think that work is any good – a different thing. The Saturday review pages wobble between these two modes, between chat about whether readers will like a book or film, and whether it’s any good or not. Some texts that have become good over time, canonical in other words, we might not like. ‘Like’, here, of course, is a very fuzzy notion, although you would have to be delusional to think a book is automatically good because you like it. And liking certain texts, Ern Malley’s poetry or Stephenie Meyer’s fiction for example, might be evidence, in some people’s view, of a lack of taste, or bad judgement. But as we say, there’s no accounting for that.' (Introduction)
'Most of us associate terra nullius – the doctrine that legalised the English occupation of a purportedly “empty” Australia – with 1788 and the very beginnings of white settlement. But Thomas Ford and Justin Clemens explain that the concept became explicit only considerably later – inspired by, of all things, road tolls.' (Introduction)
'Governor Richard Bourke’s written proclamation of terra nullius was made on October 10, 1835. The original document now resides in the National Archives of the United Kingdom.'(Introduction)
'Literary study tends to be characterised by bipolar episodes, swinging between enjoyment and judgement. There is reading for pleasure and learning to be critical, or making up your mind about how good, bad, or indifferent a literary work is. This way of thinking about literature still pervades all levels of the cultural and social scenes where readers talk to one another. We discuss with our friends or communities whether we like a work of literature or not, but when things get formal or seminar-serious the conversation shifts to whether we think that work is any good – a different thing. The Saturday review pages wobble between these two modes, between chat about whether readers will like a book or film, and whether it’s any good or not. Some texts that have become good over time, canonical in other words, we might not like. ‘Like’, here, of course, is a very fuzzy notion, although you would have to be delusional to think a book is automatically good because you like it. And liking certain texts, Ern Malley’s poetry or Stephenie Meyer’s fiction for example, might be evidence, in some people’s view, of a lack of taste, or bad judgement. But as we say, there’s no accounting for that.' (Introduction)
'There is a place in Sydney called Inscription Point, where, at the busy juncture of flight paths and container shipping traffic, a brass tablet is set into a sandstone cliff. Thereabouts Captain Cook once cut the date – 1770 – and his ship’s name – HMS Endeavour – into a tree, and so in 1822 members of the loftily-named but very short-lived Philosophical Society of Australasia had the tablet installed to mark the spot. Today the tablet’s corroded words are virtually illegible, but its brisk edges stand out from the pocked and lunging sandstone rockface – a green square, a small abstraction in the landscape. ‘Here fix the tablet. This must be the place’ reads the more lasting memorial, a sonnet by the colonial poet and judge Barron Field. It would be reasonable to think that the unveiling of the tablet is what inspired Field’s poem – that would be the normal order of things. But Field wasn’t so incidental to the scene. The tablet was his pet project: he had commandeered the Philosophical Society to this end. So, Field created the occasion for his own poem, which is as much about Cook’s inscription (‘But where’s the tree with the ship’s wood-carv’d fame?’) as about the perpetuity of his tablet.' (Introduction)
'My copy of Barron Field in New South Wales: The Poetics of Terra Nullius came adorned with a blue and white sticker from the Australian Booksellers Association, proclaiming the book as a ‘staff favourite’. Although a complex and demanding book, it is not hard to see its appeal for an Australian audience. Ford and Clemens offer a detailed analysis of the first collection of poetry published in Australia, Barron Field’s First Fruits of Australian Poetry (1819). Far from treating Field’s collection as a historical curiosity, the poetry serves as a launching pad for the authors’ wide-ranging and innovative discussion of the origins of colonial Australia and its fraught relationship with Australia’s Aboriginal people.' (Introduction)
