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Barron Field, who is today a largely forgotten figure, was from 1817 to 1824 the highest judge in New South Wales. His place in literary history rests on his First Fruits of Australian Poetry of 1819, which, as the title announces, was the first book of poetry to be published in this country. But by most accounts Field was a mediocre judge and a worse poet. John McLaren writes of the legal career that 'Field's record as a judge could best be described as mercurial, a reflection of his conservative belief system, a commitment to the culture of English law, and an opportunistic streak in his character.... Field's counsel was not invariably sound or in keeping with the Colonial Office's understanding of the legal proprieties' (144). As for his poetry, even the colonial anthologists were wary of Field's inclusion, although Vivian Smith has more recently been generous enough to judge Field's poem 'The Kangaroo' to be 'an exuberant oddity' (74). Field also appears in a number of historical studies of colonial science and culture, where he tends however to remain a minor and rather ambiguous figure (Bernard Smith; Carter).
Rarely has Field's poetry been read alongside the records of his judicial activities. But this historiographical separation of his legal from his literary projects needs to be revisited in light of Stuart Banner's research on the application of terra nullius in Australia-as does our understanding of Field's legal projects. For Banner attributes the introduction of terra nullius to Field: specifically,
The first such statement [of the doctrine] appears to have been made in 1819, when a dispute arose between Lachlan Macquarie, the governor of New South Wales, and Barron Field, judge of the New South Wales Supreme Court, over whether the Crown, acting through Macquarie, had the power to impose taxes on the residents of New South Wales, or whether that power was reserved to Parliament, as was the case with taxes imposed on residents of Britain. (112)
According to Banner's chronology, Australian terra nullius was coeval with Australian poetry. Both appeared in the same year, 1819, and were in fact even authored by the same hand. Field is then a remarkable figure in the history of Australian literature's intertwinements with colonial genocide: he was the...