Barron Field in New South Wales: The Poetics of Terra Nullius

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.

In 1819, the colony’s highest court adjudicated on tariffs levied on Parramatta Road. Had Britain officially conquered New South Wales, the court reasoned, Governor Macquarie would have been justified in raising taxes by decree. But that wasn’t the case. Instead, the governor required parliamentary authorisation for his tolls – precisely because colonisation rested on terra nullius.

As Ford and Clemens note, this bizarre “normalisation” of white settlement links the first stirrings of democracy in Australia to the country’s most notorious formulation for racist exterminism. The judge presiding in the tolls case gloried in the appropriately preposterous name Barron Field.

Born in 1786 into a nonconforming middle-class family, Field forged a successful legal career yet always fancied himself a poet. A literary rival once namechecked him alongside Romantic heavyweights

Hazlitt, Keats and Shelley (though a footnote explained “the name of Field is put in to fill in the line”, hinting at the judge’s poetic ability).

In 1819 – the same year he legitimised terra nullius – Field published the grandiloquently titled First Fruits of Australian Poetry. Ford and Clemens contend that this, the first book of poems published in Australia, provides a hitherto untapped resource to understand the complex ideological manoeuvrings by which a colonial penal settlement developed its national aspirations.

They show, for instance, how in a poem titled “The Kangaroo”, Field links an animal he considers innately paradoxical with the seeming perversity of his efforts to write from distant Australia, before connecting it and his own poetry with the white nation to come. He also deploys the kangaroo as a metonym for Aboriginal people – and so his associative chain renders Indigenous erasure as necessary for the settler state he celebrates.

“At the threshold of Australian poetry,” Ford and Clemens note, “‘The Kangaroo’ inscribes its foundational exclusion: no Blacks.” Indeed, they suggest that First Fruits constitutes “a perverse managerial handbook, in which Field tells us, in an elaborately circuitous but unequivocal way, what he wants to do in the colony, how he is going to do it, and what the consequences will be”.

Non-specialists might find the close reading of terrible 19th-century poems somewhat forbidding. Nevertheless, Barron Field in New South Wales offers a dazzlingly original argument, presenting terra nullius as not merely a juridical intervention but also a literary one, in which “poetry emerges” as “the true site of Australian colonisation’s foundational event”.

MUP, 224pp, $35

A decade has passed since Eleanor Catton became the youngest writer to win the Booker Prize for The Luminaries. A work about a murder conspiracy set in 1866 New Zealand during the gold rush, it was rich with dramatic exuberance and stylish bravado.

With Birnam Wood, Catton has created a novel of duplicity and intrigue that befits its titular allusion to Shakespeare’s Macbeth. On the first page, a “spate of shallow earthquakes triggered a landslide that buried a stretch of the highway in rubble”, sequestering the town of Thorndike from the rest of New Zealand. This secluded region, accessible only by small plane, becomes the tragic stage for a Juvenalian-style satire that exposes the folly behind late capitalism, civil disobedience, chardonnay socialism, generational divides, surveillance technology and identity politics. It is a deeply political novel that suspends its allegiance to any particular viewpoint, entering the minds of many characters and subjecting their beliefs to ironic admonishment.

The central conflict unfolds when the tree-planting collective Birnam Wood accepts dubious funding from the American billionaire Robert Lemoine. Having made his wealth through drone surveillance technology, Robert is a Machiavellian antagonist who uses an eccentric cover story of being a doomsdaysurvivalist to misdirect attention from illegal excavations of rare minerals in Korowai National Park. With his army of surveillance drones and black-hat hacker skills, Robert