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)