Cirrus@Austlit

'Barron Field is the perfect villain—an embodiment of the nation’s ills from its very institutional and cultural foundation. Appointed a judge of the Supreme Court of the NSW colony in 1817, he was (indirectly) the instigator of terra nullius and a bad poet. Hypocritical liberal reformer, early white settler-colonist and misguided literary romantic, Field has been extradited from oblivion to ignominy by Justin Clemens and Thomas H. Ford in their recent study, Barron Field in New South Wales: The Poetics of Terra Nullius (2023). Field operates all too perfectly in this role, since his foundational project of nationhood took two of the most prestigious forms available to the literary historian: legal judgment and verse. Field invoked terra nullius as a doctrine of colonial legal administration. As Clemens and Ford explain, ‘With Field, terra nullius became constitutional’. It did so through a convoluted process intended to curtail Governor Macquarie’s increasingly ‘autocratic’ rule by clarifying the juridical status of the colony. Field’s legal advice sought to resolve ‘constitutional uncertainty’ about the ‘unsettled nature’ of the colony. By denying in his letter to London in 1818 that New South Wales was ‘conquered’, Field implicitly invoked the terra nullius doctrine as a ‘silent premise, at once necessary yet unstated’. And in 1820 he published First Fruits of Australian Poetry, which despite its title, proved unfruitful in founding any tradition of Australian literature.' (Introduction)

'In an early scene in Furiosa, the fifth film in the Mad Max series, the Guardian of ‘Gastown’ (Peter Stephens) is found patiently painting atop his comically high tower, completing a scale reproduction of Hylas and the Nymphs, a legend from Greek and Roman mythology in which nymphs seduce a brash, youthful male hero while he searches for drinking water, painted initially by British artist John William Waterhouse in the late 1800s. Gastown, for those few who’ve never caught a Mad Max movie, is the reserve holding the petrol that powers the all-important vehicles in the Wasteland, the landscape in which the film cycle is set. The Guardian is unaware that a ‘great horde’ is descending upon his Wasteland fortress to depose him. When interrupted by a phone-call warning, the Guardian turns towards the camera, revealing his sallow beard and almost Bonapartist regalia, while surveying the impending threat. The following shot is trained on the horde leader Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), rapidly encroaching on the Wasteland’s sole ‘guzzolene’ refinery, riding in on a tri-motor cycle-powered Roman chariot.' (Introduction)

'At the end of Julia, a play about former prime minister Julia Gillard’s famous misogyny speech, after the rapturous applause had finally faded and the patrons had begun to shuffle out, the woman seated next to my partner and I turned to me and asked, ‘Why were you laughing so much?’ I hedged politely. Nice try, lady, but no—I was not about to confess my true feelings about a Melbourne Theatre Company production to a woman wearing a cape.' (Introduction)