Cirrus@Austlit

'At 3:30 in the afternoon on Tuesday, 1 August 1944, Police Constable C Cameron Smith visits Max Harris, one of the editors of the literary magazine Angry Penguins, at his office in Grenfell Street, Adelaide. Smith questions Harris about his involvement in the publication, and then about the meaning of several poems in the ‘Ern Malley’ section of a recent issue. When asked if one poem, called ‘Boult to Marina’, has a suggestion of indecency about it, Harris replies: ‘If you are looking for that sort of thing, I can refer you to plenty of books and cheaper publications—with worse than that in them. Our publication is intended for cultured minds, who understand these things, and place ordinary thoughts on a higher level.Smith remains unconvinced.'  (Introduction)

'Barron Field was, as we argued in our recent book Barron Field in New South Wales, responsible for the first volume of poetry published in Australia – a status flaunted in its title, First Fruits of Australian Poetry – and responsible also for the first articulation of the doctrine that later came to be known as terra nullius: that is, the foundational and genocidal legal fiction under which Australia was colonised by the British on the basis of its being previously uninhabited: i.e., that Aboriginal people, at least in the eyes of the law, simply didn’t exist, and, as not existing de jure, could be handled so as to become equally inexistent de facto. Our book examined what these two notable firsts had to do with each other. We claimed that it was no coincidence that the first Australian poet – the first person to have laid claim to that title, and indeed to have invented that category – was also the first legislator of terra nullius. Through close readings of the six poems that made up Field’s book from its second edition in 1823 – the first edition of 1819 contained just two poems – we argued that, far from being merely supplemental to his legal reformulation of the basis of colonisation, poetry was in fact instrumental to Field’s program to re-establish New South Wales on a new constitutional footing premised counterfactually on the non-existence of Aboriginal societies. To revert to a famous tag by Percy Shelley to which we paid considerable attention in the book: this poet really was the unacknowledged legislator of white Australia. In this foundational moment, the liberal colonial regime that underpinned future national development was poetic, we claimed, in inspiration, design and operation.'  (Introduction)

'All the teachers in primary school, who commented that ‘Of course you came second in cross country, Aboriginal people are really good at running fast!’. Then when I got to high school and all of my friends realised that putting in effort wasn’t cool, it was okay for them to walk the cross country without hassle but for me to do it was lazy because it’s really easy for black people to run fast, so why don’t I just do it.' (Introduction)