Cirrus@Austlit

'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)