The utterly improbably named Barron Field (1786–1846) was a Judge of the Supreme Court of the New South Wales Civil Judicature from 1817 to 1824—the highest British legal office in the incipient settler colony—and in that office was the first to introduce terra nullius into Australian law. Incredibly, he was also the first published poet on this continent, dedicating himself to ploughing the supposedly barren fields of Terra Australis in order to cultivate a national literature and culture to follow. Inevitably, the verses Field sowed were irredeemably bad, in both quality and effect.
Thomas H. Ford and Justin Clemens’s study of the man and his work offers an important intervention in the historiography of settler-colonial Australia. Together, Ford and Clemens have produced a highly original account of the complex contribution to Australian law, politics and poetics made by this ‘largely unacknowledged’ and pun-inducing figure—‘a man with a pun for a name’—here introduced as one of Australia’s founding fathers in myriad, mutually constitutive ways.
The book’s reference points—from Virgil, via Kant and Hegel, to Wordsworth and the arrival of ‘racist Romanticism’ in and as ‘constitutional’ of ‘Australia’—cross disciplinary boundaries and follow their subject across continents and associated cultural and intellectual traditions. Intervening across the conjuncture of history, law, poetry and politics, Barron Field demonstrates both their deep imbrications and their intractable contradictions in the cultures of the ‘new world’, and reveals the ongoing, iterative, eliminatory nature of Field’s (and Australia’s) terra nullius operation.
The book begins with a clear and effective disquisition of terra nullius, revealing this ‘relatively new’ concept that ‘names … a much older set of colonial concepts and practices’ as constitutional of the Australian polity. Field first applied terra nullius in a banal but implication-filled legal determination on the question of taxation and representation that was so foundational to settler-colonial traditions elsewhere, but its significance did not end there. Rather than involving the straightforward application of an established legal doctrine, what the authors usefully designate as Field’s ‘terra nullius operation’ entailed the ‘discursive’, ‘performative’, ‘non-descriptive’ (and therefore unconstrained and unaffected by reality) making operational of a demonstrably false collection of legal justifications as an ‘instrument of law and bureaucratic administration’.
Field’s introduction of terra nullius into and as ‘thefoundational sovereign act’ of settler-colonial Australia had to do with Governor Macquarie’s right, or otherwise, to levy road tolls without parliamentary approval. Field’s opinion, offered to Macquarie in 1818 and confirmed in London the following year, was that no such right existed. His argument rested on the ‘silent and implicit’ premise that New South Wales had not been conquered, but rather ‘settled’ as ‘desert and uninhabited’: that is, as a terra nullius. Despite its characteristic obfuscation of its own presuppositions, Field’s advice represented ‘the first formal articulation’ of ‘the doctrine of terra nullius’ in Australia.
This account reverses the trajectory of given accounts of Australian origination and development in important respects. Rather than being ‘a foundational event from which all else followed’, terra nullius is explicated here as ‘a long-drawn-out reiterative process of disavowed conquest, an attritional slow legal violence that keeps on having to re-secure its own retrospective legitimation’. It also challenges existing understandings of the utility of terra nullius in settler-colonial Australia, and rebuts, or at least works around, tired arguments over whether, when, how and on what grounds terra nullius was ‘formally’ applied in settler-colonial Australia, or otherwise.
Field’s operation was not, at least in its inception, oriented towards the denial of Indigenous presence, despite its ongoing implications for First Nations peoples themselves. Instead, his argument was concerned with the adjudication of relations between settlers (and their governments, representative or otherwise), rather than between settlers (and their governments) and Indigenous peoples. In his initial determination, and in the extra-juridical operation that followed, the ‘place of Aboriginal peoples’ was ‘that of a vanishing mediator’, their prior absence retrospectively asserted and their future absence presumed (or imagined), made imperative by their original disavowal. This amounted to a foundational claim to settler-colonial legitimacy, premised, in line with the settler contract more generally, on conditions of non-encounter.
As such, Field’s terra nullius was far-reaching in its intentions and effects. While terra nullius was ‘principally a legal fiction’, from its inception it exceeded legislative bounds; it has ‘always been more than legal in its reach, mechanisms and effects’. Following Field’s ‘operation’ beyond its originally juridical bounds, Ford and Clemens substantiate its socially and culturally integrated and extensive, ongoing implications through close readings of his First Fruits of Australian Poetry across its multiple iterations. First Fruits, as Ford and Clemens illustrate and as Field himself acknowledged—albeit ‘ironically’—was pregnant with meaning. So too the homophonic phrase of the protagonist himself, ‘barren fields’, speaking as it does to the foundational misconceptions underpinning ‘settlement’ as such. The etymological connections between cultivation, culture and colonisation—from the Latin root colere—loom large here, as beyond.
The reading Ford and Clemens offer here evidences the deep investment of Field’s ‘operation’ in broader, continuing settler-colonial processes oriented towards the displacement of sovereign Indigenous societies and their replacement with a singular settler one, the emergent, barely even imagined idea of a nation with which Field was concerned: ‘Australia’. Ford and Clemens insist that Field had a ‘double task’: ‘negating the foundational elements of New South Wales’ as penal colony and as ‘authoritarian military fiefdom’, and implementing ‘a positive liberal project with a new name, Australia’. But the ‘foundational elements’ to be negated also, and most fundamentally, included the existence and continuing authority of the original custodians of the land on and in relation to which that ‘positive liberal project’ was to be pursued.
Field worked towards both ends, legally, politically and poetically, to clear space via ‘the erasure, de jure and de facto, of the Aboriginal peoples whose land it was, is and always will be’ as the latent precondition from which ‘projects of Australian advancement’ would proceed. And as Field’s legal advice sought to secure the constitutional legitimacy of the emerging settler-colonial jurisdiction, his poetry, which was ‘specifically designed to efface and supplant Aboriginal people’, worked towards similar ends. Field is exposed as not only but necessarily both the ‘first poet and unacknowledged legislator of Australia’, who could also ‘lay some claim to being its first scientist’.
Over the multiple iterations of his First Fruits of Australian Poetry—the first in an apparently interminable series of attempts to establish an ‘Australian’ literary (and cultural) tradition, determinedly distinctive but unavoidably derivative, constructed contradictorily and often incoherently out of inherited traditions transposed from Europe to Australia—Field prosecuted his ‘operation’, out of which ‘Australia’ would be constituted. By bringing the legal, political, cultural and (pseudo)scientific dimensions of Field’s ‘operation’ within the same analytical frame, Ford and Clemens uncover the deep imbrication of terra nullius imaginaries across all fields—with apologies—of Australian life.
Their reading of Field’s poem ‘Kangaroo’, which has as its central concern the problem ‘of how to originate a national literature’ and responds to it by instituting the kangaroo as ‘the spirit of Australia’, is illustrative in this respect. In Field’s poetic vision, the kangaroo stands in ‘for the material basis of Aboriginal life’ and is therefore ‘consigned to extinction so as to allow the animal to function as an emblematic self-representation of modern Australia’. The poem’s ‘key message’, Ford and Clemens conclude, ‘is that the Australian project demands the active extermination of the continent’s First Nations’. In this sense, the poem’s ‘allotted task’, in line with Field’s operation as a whole, ‘is nothing less than national self-foundation’; despite its re-presentation by Field in the form of ‘a joke-filled, playful, capricious poem, “The Kangaroo” is … enrolled in a program of colonial genocide’.
This reading, and others alongside it, reveal the complex, circular temporalities associated with the irresolvable nature of the settler national/cultural predicament and the interminable contradictions arising—the cause of what David Carter, in Always Almost Modern: Australian Print Cultures and Modernity, has characterised as settler Australia’s chronic incipience. Within what Ford and Clemens call ‘the poetics of terra nullius, the present is legitimated by inscribing it as having already happened’, while that present is also cast ‘forwards, into the future perfect of the “will have been”’. This entails a doubled temporal displacement characteristic of the settler imaginary, in which the ‘future-oriented progressiveness’ of settlers and the settler nation-state coexists with, and is conditional upon,‘blindness to actually existing Aboriginal peoples in the present’, an integration of settler-colonial progressivism and genocidal elimination, a reliance of the former on the latter, that has persisted from Australia’s inception up to the present day.
The temporal circularity, and the dizzying, deeply contradictory dislocations it requires, are instantiated further through Ford and Clemens’s reading of Field’s self-serving introduction of scientific racism as part of and in support of his operation. Here, the ‘strictly circular’ (il)logics deployed—then, and reiteratively ever after—to justify settler-colonial invasion are effectively exposed, making visible the extent to which the ‘supposed empirical evidence’ offered up in support ‘was ultimately only window-dressing’ to a ‘tightly tautological loop of self-justifying reasoning’. In keeping with Patrick Wolfe’s exposition of settler-colonial regimes of racialisation in Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race, Ford and Clemens show how Field’s ‘racial research’ was directed towards a central and unavoidable question ‘in a colony … established on the … legal footing of terra nullius and progressing into the flourishing settler nation to come’—that is: ‘what is to be done with Aboriginal people?’. Field’s answer, expressed poetically and attesting once again to the encompassing nature of his operation, was: ‘let them pass, let them die’.
Field’s operation—his legal determination and its poetic inscription—was rendered ‘all the more powerful when it passed without acknowledgement’. Its force, its lasting power, inheres in its obfuscation of its own origination. Even in Field’s own legal advice, terra nullius remained ‘a weight-bearing but nonetheless silent premise, at once necessary yet unstated’. And so it continues. Field’s operation, including its poetic, (a)historic and (un)scientific inscription, was necessarily iterative and generative, necessarily premised on negation even of himself, so that even ‘his own decisive role’ in the operation ‘was self-effacing, self-negating’. Crucially, none of its dimensions—the attempted legitimation of settler jurisdiction, displacement and disavowal of sovereign Indigenous societies and ensuing projects of national cultural construction necessary for their replacement—were his alone. On the contrary, they were and remain necessarily ‘collective projects’ by virtue of their object: ‘Australia’.
It is in this sense that the book’s exposition of the lasting constitutional role of Field’s multidimensional ‘operation’ is relevant, especially in the wake of the recent referendum on the recognition of the First Peoples of Australia as the First Peoples of Australia. The overwhelmingly positive result of the 1967 referendum, frequently misrepresented as a moment of recognition, in fact—despite its symbolic significance—amounted to a negation of prior exclusion. Its result left ‘Australia’ more fully in the constitutional state Ford and Clemens see Field as originating: anomalous among even the intransigent settler-colonial states as constitutionally silent, literally and figuratively, on its own settler-colonial foundations. The failure of the more recent referendum suggests yet another reiteration—a reactionary reassertion—of the terra nullius operation Field inaugurated more than two centuries earlier.
In the contemporary, post-referendum context of settler-colonial Australia, it seems appropriate to conclude by noting the persistence of the terra nullius operation out of which ‘Australia’ emerged and around which it continues to be organised. As Ford and Clemens observe, Field’s operation comprised a complex ‘gathering of elements and materials that has held in Australia not only politically but also culturally for two centuries, a tradition that never ceases to repeat this original imposition without knowing it’ (my emphasis). If, as they suggest, the lasting constitutional force of Field’s terra nullius operation inheres, at least in part, in its concealment of its own inception and persistence, then the kind of careful, critical exposition offered here may provide some much-needed and long overdue redress.