… that sinful orientation will distort and ultimately invalidate any efforts they might make by themselves to alter that orientation…
Stephen Mulhall, Philosophical Myths of the Fall
And we dream all those self-same dreams…
Barron Field, ‘Botany-Bay Flowers’
Fields of History
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.
Field arrived on the shores of a penal colony armed with administrative modernity and intent on integrating it into the British Empire, and indirectly provided the justification for the dispossession of Aboriginal people. He is a foil so perfectly bad he can be made to embody everything wrong with our national history. In this telling of his story, haplessness does not add pathos to his acts of genocidal erasure; instead it bolsters the knowingness of our historical judgement. We are a stacked jury, set up to condemn Field to become a permanent exhibit in a narrative that conceives of the nation as indelibly marked with the sin of genocide, the wound of dispossession and the folly of bad taste.
If these legally consequential acts and poetic vanities seem ill-paired, it is Clemens and Ford’s argument that they belong together. His poems are ‘indispensable documents for deciphering’ the repressed reality of genocidal violence. In an era of political exhaustion, when even the most modest political projects face the prospect of defeat and ignominy, the resuscitation and prosecution of Barron Field on the dock of aesthetic judgement seems to represent an attempt to incite us to fresh indignation. Yet it is unlikely to incite a radical new politics, since it is weighed with burden of psychic guilt and collective trauma.
As part of the short-lived Philosophical Society of Australasia, Field and his co-conspirators installed a plaque at the location of Cook’s first landing in Botany Bay. To identify the site, they relied on an unnamed Aboriginal informant who pointed out the place to them. Field’s undoubtedly terrible sonnet ‘On visiting the spot’, along with the plaque, form what Clemens and Ford call ‘the elements of a single, unified poetic project of colonial memorialisation’. Chris Healy argued in From the Ruins of Colonialism (1997) that the Society’s reliance on an Aboriginal informant was a ‘tragic instance of settler elision of Aboriginal knowledge’. But for Clemens and Ford, it is far more sinister. They literalise the act of installing the plaque on a sandstone cliff as an intentional wounding that permanently fixes the relationship between white settler colonists and Aboriginal people. By ‘unifying’ the poetic and colonial projects, Clemens and Ford implicitly foreclose other possibilities raised by what historians like Massimiliano Tomba in ‘The Past as Battlefield’ (2022), call the ‘conflict between historical trajectories’, temporalities and political movements in history.
Whatever ambiguous possibilities are contained by the record of the transmission of Aboriginal knowledge, which might be revived in a project of truth-telling and political change, they are foreclosed by Field’s commemorative poem. Clemens and Ford write,
we take Field’s inscriptive project to be engaged in a much more active erasure. Australian social memory is violent. The tablet is part of an artwork which cannot be characterised by silent omission. Nor does it offer a potential meeting-place between cultures. It is instead an artwork—distributed, site-specific, poetic—of genocidal aggression.
Granted such a status, few artworks have been more historically and politically consequential. Indeed, it is a dream of artists and scholars alike that artworks should have such solemn efficacy. Typically, they simply do not, and Clemens and Ford’s exaggeration of the power of Field’s bad poetry should give us pause. In his assessment of their book in Arena 18, Dan Tout defines the ‘performative’ efficacy of Field’s actions as ‘therefore unconstrained and unaffected by reality’. But performances take place, and require uptake, in reality in order to take effect. They are as vulnerable to failure as any performative act or utterance, as scholars have unevenly recognised since J. L. Austin. For Field’s poems to be what Clemens and Ford call ‘performatively incarnating and disseminating the very ideals that they declare to be the case’, they would require an audience to respond to, acquiesce to and administer their ideals. This audience, for Field’s poetry at least, is notably absent prior to the very book in which they are declared so malevolently felicitous.
How can this part-time poet, anthologised nowhere, almost buried and forgotten, cast such a pall over Australia’s national history? Should we grant him such a place, rendering by the conflation of legal and aesthetic judgement the fate of history up to the perfect villain?
The Wound of Origination
Clemens and Ford’s treatment of Field is emblematic of a broader phenomenon that treats the past not as a resource for redemptive hope or political possibility, nor as an arena to contest the meaning of history—say, to re-interpret and re-define our collective identity—but as something both fixed, singular and wounded. It is a feature of such histories, contends Jed Esty in The Future of Decline (2022), that they have no theory of either historical change or collective action. Barron Field presides over a national story whose foundational sin of genocidal dispossession is only compounded by a culture so bad it was single-handedly invented by the same man, now in the guise of a failed poet, whose legal judgments shaped the legal justification for that same dispossession. But in order for such a national story to play the role it does in Clemens and Ford’s account, we must first dispense with alternatives: histories that seek possibilities, that stir up alternatives, that reshape and reframe the past and its heavy burden.
The meaning of history is determined with the force of legal judgment and the unequivocal confidence with which we safely condemn Field’s poetic output to the category ‘bad’, like a plaque ‘frozen in “Ephesian brass”’. In fact, ‘you might almost see the plaque, when read in the company with the sonnets, as itself a kind of weapon, for it venerates violent colonisation in order to perpetuate it’. The plaque and poem become an unstoppable ‘weapon’, the gunshot of which resounds through the centuries. Clemens and Ford seem to contend that nothing can stop or divert this wounding blast. Even—or perhaps especially—Field’s obscurity does not protect us from him. ‘We enjoy the fruits of Australian life precisely by not comprehending what it is we are putting into our mouths; we live in the aftermath of Field’s project without recognising its operations or origins’. His insignificance becomes a paradoxical explanation for his overbearing power, with Clemens and Ford arguing that terra nullius ‘was all the more powerful when it passed without acknowledgement’. Yet what was tacit in legal judgment was made explicit in Field’s poetry, if only through botanic metaphor as in the plagiaristically awful ‘Botany-Bay Flowers’.
What desert forests, and what barren plains
Lie unexplor’d by European eye, …
Ev’n in those tracts, which we have visited,
Though thousands of thy vegetative works
Have, by the hand of Science (as ’tis called)
Been murder’d and dissected, press’d and dried
Till all their blood and beauty are extinct;
And name’d in barb’rous Latin, men’s surnames,
With terminations of the Roman tongue;
Yet tens of thousands have escap’d the search,
The decimation, the alive-impaling,
Nick-naming of GOD’s creatures—’scap’d it all.
Given that, as Clemens and Ford state, ‘There is no avoiding it: it is a bad poem’, what—at risk of orchestrating an indulgent orgy of condemnation, or equally at risk of calcifying history as the chronicle of cardinal sin—is to be learned from their undoubtedly brilliant close readings of each of Field’s terrible poems? Clemens and Ford’s erudite and scathing takedown of Field runs the risk of ransacking the past only for its worst. Field is submitted to presentist political and aesthetic judgement, returning from the dock having smeared his irredeemable legacy on two centuries of colonial settlement.
The Badness of the Past
Field’s execrable example ‘compels a reopening of the dossier on what poetic badness might actually mean’. However, Clemens and Ford advance a far more ambitious thesis—one that extends, along with Romantic literary theory, into everyday life by ‘erasing the border between poetry and non-poetry’. They are asking what bad poetry might do: how it might do bad. This makes poetry ‘the legislative spirit of white Australia’. A demonstration and excoriation of Field’s poetic badness, then, radiates out to the whole ‘spirit’ of the nation. Field becomes exemplary and foundational all in the same fateful moment, sealing the nation’s origins in a vortex of awfulness from which no salvation is possible.
Field’s extradition is the latest symptom of what historian Mark McKenna, in ‘The History Anxiety’, his 2013 reflection on the uneasy historical consciousness of Australians in The Cambridge History of Australia, has called a malaise that attacks any attempt to redeem ‘Australia’ as a national project. McKenna describes how after:
the decades-long confrontation with Australia’s Indigenous history … History was increasingly imagined through Christian metaphors of evil, atonement and absolution, the nation personified as a soul stained by sin or a conscience plagued by repressed memories.
In expanding the immediately obvious pun of Field’s name, Tout describes the homophonic ‘barren fields’ as speaking ‘to the foundational misconceptions underpinning “settlement” as such’. Perhaps ‘miscarriage’ may have better met the sense of ‘barren’ Tout is implying, because ‘misconceive’ implies a fault, an error that may be corrected. Instead, for Tout as for others such as Lorenzo Veracini, Australia and ‘Field’s operation … was necessarily generative and iterative, necessarily premised on negation’ (my emphasis). The tension between generation and negation leads Dan Tout and Lorenzo Veracini, in their 2024 essay ‘The negative Commonwealth’ in Thesis Eleven, to propose that any attempt to tell the history of Indigenous dispossession is ‘foreclosed’:
if it is told, it is because it can no longer be denied, as has increasingly been the case since the 1960s. So, the contemporary implications of this history, finally acknowledged, must be foreclosed—‘blemished chapters’ are acknowledged precisely in order that ‘new pages’ might be opened. These ‘pages’, presumably pages of a history book yet to be written, are in the future. History is thus still displaced (and therefore, paradoxically, negated).
But new ‘pages’ can be turned within history itself, like the history of Indigenous resistance in response to settler dispossession. Moreover, new pages may also be turned—albeit metaphorically—in politics.
The contest over monuments, the reshaping of historical narratives and curricula and the use of history as an argument to campaign for political change signals that history has become, as Matthew Karp observes in his Harper’s essay ‘History as End’ (2021), ‘a new kind of political priority’. But these contests, insofar as they play a role in political movements, can also represent a different, more redemptive vision of the past that runs counter to the view of history as a repository of sorrow—nothing more than the oppression without the tradition of resistance. This is not to minimise the real violence and genocidal motives at play in settler colonies. It is only to suggest that when survivors of these atrocities have reached for history, it has been also to draw inspiration: to find the insurgent, forgotten possibility and recover it in the name of bringing about political change in the present. Resistance does not abate the reality of genocide, but it suggests avenues for solidarities with the past and in the present beyond the grindingly deterministic, even tragic reiteration of a cursed foundation. The past is far from perfect, but insofar as we look to it as both the context and impetus for our actions in the present, we can remake the way we encounter this imperfect past.
Judgements in the Present
To look to history in expectation of redemption is, according to Joan Wallach Scott’s On the Judgment of History (2020), a peculiarly modern habit. The revolutionary period that inaugurated the liberal nation-state system was predicated on retelling the histories of antiquity, turning them into models of political self-organisation. Humans became the creative agents in time, turning history from the impersonal unfolding of teleological inevitability into the intentional, sometimes misguided product of human action. Scott evokes a model of historical judgement that remains compelling, also evoked in Tom Griffiths’s assertion that we need ‘radical histories … not only because they help us to better understand our predicament, but also because they might enable us to act, with intelligence and grace’. However, this also entails a model for historical judgement derived from legal judgment. Scott writes that ‘The judgment of history, then, becomes inseparable from the judgments of the designated juridical/legal institutions of the state’.
Barron Field was, in a sense, a failed liberal revolutionary, reinventing the past through his bad poetry in order to cast the foundation of a new national culture in more auspicious light than in his legal judgments. His views were progressive for the time in being anti-slavery, culturally sophisticated and scientifically informed. The principal legal judgment in which he opposed Governor Macquarie’s quasi-feudal rule—embodied rather absurdly in a tollgate installed in 1819 at the bottom of George Street in Sydney—was guided by an evocation of ‘the spirit of American revolt’, albeit in an attempt to stifle any revolutionary instincts among the ‘free-booters and pirates’. Australia was to be a nation, one that reformed the ‘authoritarian military fiefdom’ it was becoming under Macquarie, without exactly admitting democracy. Field imagined ‘Australia’ as ‘the implementation of a positive liberal project’, in the words of Clemens and Ford.
Field was a mixed, contradictory character. It may be, as Jonathan Lear in Imagining the End (2022) muses regarding American history, that ‘precisely in our dedication to overcome [colonialism] we need (among many other things!) to find appropriate ways to mourn the absence of mourning’. If Field’s efficacy lies in being unacknowledged, historical work may be the place to mourn failed or erroneous ideals and judgements. Lear suggests that ‘We can leave ultimate judgments about the value of their lives to some other realm’. We must redeem past injustices not from sin, but from the narrative of sin itself.
The tone of judgement, stripped of faith in the possibility of redeeming progress, has shifted. It is not simply the renewed vigour with which we are retrieving and re-prosecuting the crimes of the past—though there is no shortage of stern judgements issued not only from historians like Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan, but from figures like David Marr, whose recent Killing for Country: A Family Story (2023) turns this national crime into a personal journey. After the prematurely announced end of history and the long interregnum as we wait for something to begin, the past seems to be able to do little other than poison the struggles of the present, like a wound we cannot help but re-expose, like penitents bereft of the promise of salvation.
Clemens and Ford’s project seems to propose that where historical and legal judgements have failed to reform our national character, aesthetic judgements might spur us to new consciousness. But it remains unremittingly negative in its assessment of the Australian spirit. Field’s poetry:
emerges here as the true site of Australian colonisation’s foundational event and as the medium of Australian literature’s most decisive act, its originary framing of cultural nationhood. Unspoken but imperative, it is a poetic death sentence still eliciting correspondences at a distance now of some two centuries.
Without political projects that may reshape our understanding of both ourselves and the past, history becomes a dead weight, a crime from which we cannot be absolved.
Misconceptions of Nationhood
This is particularly true of narratives of national foundation, like Clemens and Ford’s, or like projects in the United States that, in the wake of a political lurch to the Right, reignited the search for the toxic origin. For example, Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020) and The New York Times’s ‘The 1619 Project’ enjoinder a ‘passionate remembrance of things past’ whose desire for a single, simple origin risks fixing the present by reference to a singular, determining past. Elizabeth S. Anker, in On Paradox: The Claims of Theory (2022), contests the way these histories frame the past as an ‘unbroken narrative’, as though no one had protested, sought change, won victories and suffered losses. By tracing injustice to the soul of the nation, any proposal to change or alter simply works to ‘engineer oppression’. For example, Veracini describes ‘deep colonising’ in his 2010 book Settler Colonialism as ‘a predicament where the very institutions that should operate towards a supersession of colonial contingencies are actually contributing to reinforcing their operative registers’. Condemning historical projects as irremediable is just a transvaluation of the view that treats the past as inviolable, or constitutions as sacred. Both views fix the past’s meaning, and so seal the fate of the present.
‘Rather than mine the past for usable politics—whether as analogue, inspiration, or warning—thinkers now travel in the opposite direction, from present injustice to historical crime’, writes Matthew Karp. Surpassing the stagnation of the end of history, Karp argues that history has become our end: the place we turn to as explanation for why we cannot be or do otherwise. Marr’s account of his family’s involvement in frontier massacres in Killing For Country falls heavily on the attempt to transform the nation’s relationship with Aboriginal people through constitutional recognition. Instead, ‘How little things change’ runs through it as a refrain insisting that nothing will. The finality of historical judgement presiding over a sinful national origin leaves us with an unworkable past. We are either trapped by the past’s iniquities, or, as the position of judgement presupposes, external to this history, adjudicating from a safe moral distance.
Like Karp’s ‘passionate remembrance’, in ‘Abortive Rituals’ (2000) Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot frames the era as one of ‘a soul-searching exercise into memory land’. As Marr demonstrates and Joan Scott theorises, the nation comes to be treated, for reasons as much therapeutic as heuristic, as a psyche in distress. The turn from history to memory also serves this transformation, personalising our relationship to the past in ways inimical to transformative judgements. Rather than an historical ledger to be squared by assessing evidence, we accumulate personal accounts which, insofar as they do not correspond, simply testify to traumatic foundations from different, equally incompatible perspectives. Our judgements no longer sort right from wrong action. Instead, as Ruth Leys argues, the model of traumatic origins insists that they be turned into acts of listening whose ethical debt can never be exhausted.
The risk of this model of history is turning acts of political intent into psychological distortions undergone in the aftermath of sin and suffering. In Forgetting Aborigines (2008), Chris Healy suggests that ‘the performance and organisation of social memory provides one way of thinking about why [Aboriginal people] keep on disappearing’. Healy remarks that they are ‘recognised and identified’ but ‘overlooked and disregarded’ as if what intervened was a kind of visual aphasia, rather than a vision of the nation propped up in the interests of a particular capitalist and colonial project. From the psychological to the personal, Julianne Schultz’s The Idea of Australia: A Search for the Soul of the Nation (2022) suggests the ‘habit of not looking back’ is a result of ‘bullies’ and political leaders with no imagination. While for Schultz the prospect of a ‘positive notion of national identity’ is ‘irreparably tarnished’, in his critical assessment ‘Settler Nationalism and Progressive Discourse’ (Arena 15) Dan Tout contends that ‘It is also divine’, since, he argues, ‘[Schultz] is, after all, searching for a soul—in part because the heart and body she has found are so fundamentally flawed’.
The very idea of searching for a national ‘soul’ sanctions the treatment of history as a psychic repository. As Trouillot argues, it provides ‘the engine behind both the recognition of past failures and the will to reach a higher moral plane’. But it is important to note that this ‘higher moral plane’ is not in fact the achievement of political progress or change. Instead, as Scott argues, it is based on a secular version of the ‘moral impeccability about history’s judgment’, based on a biblical ‘day of reckoning’ whose ‘phantasmatic function’ is to give ‘transcendent reassurance for one’s moral positions’. In other words, for the liberal progressive, there are few more certain judgements than the moral turpitude of the past, and reiterating this judgement bolsters the present’s moral authority while bemoaning its origins. As David Marr’s clumsy refrain goes, ‘How little these people have changed’. The inertia of history can be attributed to backward types, resistant to decades of moral exhortation.
Correcting the Record
If condemning the politics of the past has not induced change, condemning its poetry might do the trick. Field’s fateful contribution to the national foundation was to covertly impose the ‘operations and ramifications of terra nullius’ through the use of ‘poetry as the legislative spirit of white Australia’. Field’s poetry spoke what legal judgment could only whisper, making ‘poet-made law’. However, as Clemens and Ford readily attest, the ‘colonisation of Australia preceded its legal justification; terra nullius operated retrospectively… the legal fiction nonetheless backdates its own priority in an ecstasy of retroactive legislation’. No one doubts the power of the terra nullius myth. But our judgements of Field’s accuracy in applying the terra nullius doctrine, and our judgements of the application seem to run at cross-purposes.
Field is to be condemned for both. But telling the history of the inaccurate application of the doctrine seems to suggest we might correct the judgement, as Andrew Fitzmaurice and David Ritter have done. Fitzmaurice writes that ‘the Mabo judgment’ did not reject the doctrine of terra nullius but was, instead, consistent with the Western legal tradition’s application of it. This correction asserts through a legal judgment the political injustice of colonial dispossession in the very terms of the historical actors themselves. We do not need to indulge Joan Scott’s ‘phantasmatic function’ of the present’s moral authority in order to condemn the doctrine’s application to Australia and its role in justifying genocide. We need history to perform this correction.
On the other hand, telling the history of the application of the doctrine implies that it was the doctrine that was responsible for the act of dispossession. Further, it requires that we invest Field’s judgment with outsized efficacy, as though his scribal act ploughed ferociously into the scene of history and left a bleeding furrow that enabled colonial dispossession to proceed unfettered by legal boundaries. Field’s forgotten legal and poetic legacy becomes the founding act, and his intentions a determining precept. However, as Clemens and Ford recognise, it would misconstrue colonial dispossession to suggest that it always and everywhere took place with the benediction of law, or to suggest that participants, observers and victims, as well as those who fought against the frontier of colonisation, did not also have their own moral and political judgements that forced the doctrine to undergo whatever mutations and transformations made it function until it was overturned.
Under The Eaves of Empire
The contrition embodied in the glut of sinful national histories does not serve the aim of expiating sin. Instead, Trouillot argues, it makes the sorrow circulate in an unlimited way. When the individual is invited to participate in what he calls the ‘abortive ritual’ of apology, the affective force of our encounter with history is turned towards renewing our collective identity. Yet, both like and unlike the triumphal collectives invoked by historians like Geoffrey Blainey, ventriloquising an ‘undifferentiated’ people, as Stuart Macintyre observes in Making History, the apology summons into existence the penitent mass. While inverting its meaning, this process of universalisation mimics the founding of the liberal nation as a progressive collective project. It also, eerily, draws on the resources of the modern lyric, serving to evangelise for the empire. If, for Trouillot, apologies ‘make affect safe for democracy’, for Clemens and Ford, Field was ‘thinking through the pacification of the world according to the domination of moralising print… The individual “I” in hymnals dissolves into the “we” of the assembled community of believers, and, beyond them, into the harmony of the universal church itself’.
And do not imagine we can cast our eyes around for an exit from this cathedral of empire. Arjun Appadurai noted in ‘Patriotism and its Futures’ (1993) that ‘beyond the nation’ the prospects for collective identity were bleak, from ethnonationalism to a condition of ‘post-nationalism’ that, like post-colonialism, is ‘marked by its whiteness’. History’s stain spreads to the planetary scale, through empire, globalisation, and the postcolonial proliferation of nations each requiring a story of trauma to kickstart their foundation. And it spreads into our souls, insinuating itself in the guise of poetry’s lyrical voice to the most private, subjective experiences. Conscience no longer whispers in our hearts, as in Reynolds’s recovery of opposition to colonial genocide, guiding us to repair our ways and revise our stories. The psychological, like the aesthetic, works in alliance with the legal to cement the genocidal intent in the national soul.
What do we want our historical narratives to do? And in what sense does their status as narrative connect them to story, to literature and so to aesthetic judgement? If a starting point, following the Uluru Statement from the Heart and echoed by scholars like Victoria Grieves, is ‘truth-telling about our history’, then a role for story-telling, as Kim Scott writes in ‘Not so easy: Language for a shared history’ (2015), is ‘social transformation’. But the writer, Scott laments, is ‘torn’ by what he calls a ‘postcolonial dilemma’, writing for an audience ‘overwhelmingly representing the coloniser’. On the other hand, could Scott’s success as a writer be evidence, not of the integration or assimilation into colonial narrative, but of the transformation of that historical narrative and the people who subsist upon it? Scott mistrusts the applause because ‘it may mean you have been rendered innocuous’. On the other hand, it may be proof that your audience has learnt how to applaud a new story, endorse a new meaning or engage in new politics.
Scott’s suspicion is justified. Indigenous people continually confront what Gary Foley in ‘State of the Nation?’ (2023) calls ‘that same phenomenon of a cult of national amnesia’ that undermines ‘any attempts to correct the historical record’ and acts as an obstacle to politics. The scholar Leela Ghandi suggests that ‘postcolonial amnesia is symptomatic of the urge for historical self-invention or the need to make a new start’. Without proper reckoning with the colonial past, this self-invention will produce malignant spirits like Barron Field. But there is the risk of abandoning the project of historical reinvention—one that begins not from some innocent blank slate, nor from a wounded soul destined to poison all efforts to change. We have so perfected our scathing judgements, both historical and literary, that we have forgotten judgements can also praise, recommend or endorse. By honing negative judgements through narratives of sin and traumatic founding, we debar the historical record from informing what we might otherwise do. At least, to keep with the tenor of the times, if ritual applause is treated with suspicion, so should be the melancholic ritual of condemnation.