Agent of the Year
Lucy Van on Ford & Clemens
1. SFINDILIS TAKES A COFFEE
A classic Melbourne morning. I am in a classic bad mood and I’m walking out of my house to look for coffee. Classic. Melbourne, a city which prides itself on its coffee, which is presided over by coffee culture. A local tautology wherein culture is always already synonymous with coffee, coffee with culture: ‘coffee culture’ the guidebooks and real estate copy tell you; I don’t know why, to reassure you, I suppose. Around the world, Montreal to Mumbai, so to speak, you can find things that describe themselves as ‘Melbourne cafes’ and ‘Melbourne coffees’. ① But let me stay for now in Melbourne, home of coffee culture. AB(P)C: Always be proximate to coffee. Speaking of real estate, as I walk to one of the 1000 cafes within the 1000m radius of my home, I pass the fellas who are digging into some recently concreted wall at the base of some stairs to a just-about-completed seven-storey apartment complex. They have fucked something up and they are fixing it. This is the ontology of buildings: always be building. ABB. Or, in the related ontology of Australia: always be renovating. Hence the enduring appeal of The Block, House Rules, Selling in the City and their ilk: renovation has easily taken aesthetic precedence over the other Australian folk arts, the height of which previously was probably gardening. (Hence the then-commercial appeal of Burke’s Backyard; bless the Friday night viewers of Gardening Australia, which rolls along on the national broadcaster.) Certainly, renos are another thing that get into my path on the way to the place with the coffee (skips, scaffolds, the scat of a reversing van). Build it, fix it, tear it down, build it again.
The project manager of this apartment building and I have been making embarrassed eye contact for nearly twelve months. A few more workers look at the man digging into the recently finished wall. They are all holding takeaway coffee cups. This apartment building is the fourth of the four apartment blocks that have gone up on each corner of the intersection between two main roads here, settling some matter that concerns us all but interests only the passionate few: the density heads, the development heads, the anti-density heads, the anti-development heads. At the heart of it all is how to make a home and how to make money, a double helix that continually cancels its own building block to life.
What is life in Melbourne? Melbourne, settled in 1835, despite the Proclamation urging otherwise—made that same year by the Governor of the Colony of New South Wales, Governor Bourke, who sought to settle the matter of the wild land grabbing going on south of the Great Dividing Range by squatters. Squatters were absolutely going for it, taking up their runs for grazing sheep and cattle all over what was to become Victoria. ‘Taking up a run’ is an interesting phrase that Niel Black, a contemporary of the energetic late-1830s squatters, once parsed for posterity like this:
The best way [to take up a run] is to go outside and take up a new run, provided the conscience of the party is sufficiently seared to enable him without remorse to slaughter natives right and left. It is universally and distinctly understood that the chances are very small indeed of a person taking up a new run being able to maintain possession of his place and property without having recourse to such means — sometimes by wholesale … ②
Taking up a run. A genteel saying of something (killing Aboriginal people) without the saying of anything much, sounding to heritage-trained ears indistinguishable from other folksy terms for rural property management. Business as usual, then: both the reference and the referent essential, it seems, to the basis for the high society wealth of the state of Victoria, of which Melbourne is the apotheosis. Never forget that by 1840, after the failure of the first Aboriginal Mission administered by George Langhorne at the site where the Royal Botanical Gardens now grow (in 1837 Langhorne’s brother, Alfred, had taken up a run on the land essentially continuous with this site at the now preeminent heritage site, Como House, owned from 1864 by the illustrious pastoralists, the Armytage Family; Como House now exhibits the unreconstructed glories of Victoria’s ‘stately’ colonial past, and houses the headquarters of Heritage Australia, Victoria), the settlement was declared by the next Governor of New South Wales, Sir George Gipps, and the first Superintendent of the Port Phillip District, Charles La Trobe, a no-go zone for the Woi Wurrung and Boon Wurrung peoples, an exclusion to be administered by Chief Protector Augustus Robinson ostensibly to ‘protect’ First Peoples from the badnesses of the burgeoning colonial city. Strange interpretations of ‘protection’ ensued.
Now: ‘settle’ is a word I have just used in some variation. Strange word: to fix (what is uncertain), to decide (a question); to furnish a place with inhabitants (i.e., ‘settlers’); to subject permanently to regulations, to set permanently in order, to place on a permanent footing (institutions and government). In the Oxford English Dictionary: to quiet, tranquilise, compose; to sink; to recover from drink; to quiet with a blow. To finish.
Though he did not use the phrase explicitly, what Bourke did with that Proclamation of 1835, his cease and desist to the theft of land that had been going on left and right (or rather, west and south) of the colonial city of Sydney, of grave importance to maintaining the authority of colonial governance, was to invoke the doctrine of terra nullius. How did he do this? Evidently, it had come to the Governor’s attention that ‘divers of His Majesty’s subjects [had] taken possession of the vacant Lands of the Crown within the limits of this Colony, under the pretence of a treaty, bargain, or contract, for purchase thereof, with the Aboriginal Natives.’ ③ The treaty was void, Bourke decreed, because the land was—by the logic of terra nullius—uninhabited and thus could not be traded with the inhabitants who happened to be there. This treaty was, of course, the infamous deal brokered by John Batman on behalf of the Port Phillip Association, a band of fifteen leading colonist graziers from Van Diemen’s Land looking to expand their ventures on the mainland, with the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. The vile, rapacious and murderous character of Batman and his crew are not the subject of this review—suffice to say I could go on, and strange it seems to leave that matter there. I have, however, often felt that vile as Batman was, the memory of his skullduggerous treaty has (wrongly) eclipsed the significance of the Bourke government’s response. At the time Bourke’s Proclamation was effectively toothless: those ‘divers of His Majesty’s subjects’ continued in droves to ‘illegally’ take up runs throughout the Port Phillip District, indifferent to the consequences of taking possession of Crown land as they amassed grand fortunes and boosted grand legacies. (Why would they care? To press a point worthy of pressing, from 1835 those first squatters paid nobody for the vast swathes of land they claimed, briskly destroying whole ecosystems by grazing; it was only in 1844 that a small licensing fee was introduced to those [incensed] grazers.) But the Proclamation had a deeper power as the continent’s colonies slowly worked themselves toward Federation. Indeed, the Proclamation’s power drew from an important precedent that had already settled the following questions. What was the legal basis for the opinion that the Batman’s deal was an illegal possession? Under what authority could this land to the south be proclaimed a vacancy, belonging to no one so belonging to the Crown? What was the semantic basis for Bourke’s property distinctions between Crown land and private land, at the time futile—but in time, absolutely decisive?
2. NOBODY LIKES TOLLS
What am I doing when I shift the story of Barron Field in New South Wales, the subject and title of the book by Thomas H. Ford and Justin Clemens, a decade or two forward (when the man Barron Field was long gone, first to other colonial concerns in Ceylon and Gibraltar, and by 1846, to his just reward), and several hundred kilometres out of the original (official) limits of the colony that concern the book? ④ What I am doing, I think, is following a template for beginning in Australia that Field himself set in 1819—a decisive year—both as the first (and virtually unacknowledged) legislator of terra nullius, as Judge of the Supreme Court of Civil Judicature of New South Wales, and author of Australia’s first published book of poems, First Fruits of Australian Poetry. This template for beginning could be thought of as beginning again—renovating, if you will—the rudimentary judiciary and literary structures of the first British colony on the continent. If Field was the inventor of an instrumentalised terra nullius in Australia (as Ford and Clemens convincingly show), as well as the inventor of ‘Australian poetry’ (English language poetry of the previous decades of the colony consisted of a handful of odes delivered at official functions, and rude little satires known as ‘pipes’), he also effectively instaured the driving culture of renovation of what Fiona Allon has called our ‘Renovation Nation’: our collective craze for building again. ⑤
What I am also doing when I shift the story across 1835 and below the Great Dividing Range is trying my hardest to understand something that continues to puzzle me. If the considerable area of land stolen by squatters was in violation of Bourke’s decree, which leant utterly on the doctrine of terra nullius passed into law by Field, how was the doctrine, in its constitutional form, materially significant to the Australians who were subject to that law? Taking the instance of Port Phillip District as exemplary, it seems to me that the idea of terra nullius in an ambient sense mattered a great deal; while in a specific legal sense, it was not much of a great deal at all.
I think there is a good Australian rhetorical structure for this kind of cultural comprehension: the structure is the ‘yeah, nah.’ ‘Yeah,’ terra nullius works for the squatters in that Lockean sense of who can own land, one of the key terra nullius ideas circulating in the atmosphere of eighteenth-century imperialism. ⑥ But also, ‘nah’ to the concept of Crown Land, fuck that, and fuck Governor Bourke, too.
Shifting the time and place of the story of Barron Field means to show, I suppose, that something happened in those critical years of Field’s presence in New South Wales (1817–1824), a disjunctive, assimilable, generalisable something that would reverberate over the next two hundred years—in our laws, in our poetries, towards the lands and waters and in our dreams about them. The Australian painter, John Olsen, who died while I was reading the penultimate chapter of Barron Field, was remembered in an obituary with these words: ‘I am the landscape and the landscape is me.’ ⑦ The exuberant quasi-chiasmus has that ring of what is sometimes called ‘White Indigeneity,’ the aesthetic fantasy of belonging that reproduces Aboriginal modes of relating to land while relying on Aboriginal dispossession and forgetting Aboriginal presence. Field’s poetic responses to the Australian landscape, as Ford and Clemens write, were likewise ‘dedicated to the assimilation of the natural oddities of Australia.’ Field’s first ‘Australian poems’—‘The Kangaroo’ and ‘Botany-Bay Flowers,’ were foundational for what was to come. If not strictly an instance of White Indigeneity, the passage of these ‘oddities’ into the language of Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth were ‘a necessary step in the land’s administrative submission to English ascendency’ (153); this administrative matter was itself a necessary step to the Tom Roberts, the Patrick Whites, the Sidney Nolans, the chiacking Tim Wintons, those espousers of spirit of the nation, working out whether aesthetics could settle the matter of a collective identity, that is, the destiny of this strange settlement. ⑧
While I was reading Barron Field, I had a dream. I was in the flat where my friend, the poet George Mouratidis, lives. George was nowhere to be seen, but I had a feeling something bad was about to happen to him there. Someone had broken into his home, and they were looking for something, a receipt maybe. I was waving a piece of paper I had found there, insisting on its bearing on the intrusion. It was a matter of great urgency but, as with all dreams, that matter remained unsettled. Looking back at the dream I can’t help but see myself as intruder, and that the receipt I was waving was not George’s, but my own, the very receipt I had broken in to look for. The day after I dreamt this, I read an article by Anne Poelina, Stephen Muecke and Sandy Toussaint, ‘A Martuwarra Serpent Stirs in Its Sleep,’ in the new issue of the Griffith Review. ⑨ There is a beautiful passage in it about a dream that helps me abide with, if not understand, my own:
One of us had a dream while we were writing this story. Stephen dreamed that he destroyed the Martuwarra, what the kartiya (non-Aboriginal people) called the Fitzroy River Valley after one of their early explorers. He dreamed that, digging his thumbnails into a seam, he just broke the country open like a piece of cake falling apart. Shadows crowd our minds and hearts.
The police came to see him then. In the dream, Stephen said, ‘You can’t arrest me. There’s no law against destroying the Fitzroy River. There’s no law against destroying the planet either!’ ⑩
That’s right, Field, then Bourke, then every other legislator in the country would say. That’s wrong, the River would say. The Martuwarra already had law, has law, and this was Stephen Muecke’s dream, which heard by its key reversal ‘the reality of Customary Law… the principles that guide, teach, restore and care for all living things.’ ⑪ No, I don’t want to interpret my dream here, but I do feel the stirring of a few elements that have a retrospective expression to them—
waving a paper, insisting on the (in)justice of something paid or unpaid, unsure of whether the poet had granted me permission to enter his home. Or rather, unsure whether I was supposed to pay to enter, and if so, what that payment should be. It’s a joke without a setup (so I give none) that the basis of Field’s legal opinion—that the colony was settled and not conquered— came about because he had to deal with the issue of his predecessor, Judge Bent’s unpaid and overdue road tolls. These had been raised at a collection point where George Street met Parramatta Road, at an extravagant tollgate devised by then Governor Macquarie and built in 1819—again, the decisive year.
Fuck Macquarie, said Bent, as the unpaid road toll notices piled up at his office at the Supreme Court, or more likely, in the library of his Judge’s Residence (near present-day Bent Street), not far from Government House (the current site of the Museum of Sydney). What was in dispute was whether Macquarie had the legal authority to raise a tax here in the colony, and if so, under which authority. Ford and Clemens go into the legal histories that align at this moment in satisfying and lucid detail—the short version, Field found, could be reduced to an either/or formula:
1. If the colony was conquered territory, the Governor, acting for the King, possessed authority to tax as he chose
2. If the colony was settled (i.e., as territory where there was no one to conquer), subjects could only be taxed by legislative assembly
In order to install proper constitutional order, and probably to avoid the situation in America, an ‘object lesson in how not to set up a colony’ (32), New South Wales was placed in the second category, setting in store a new common law that underpinned the most extraordinary legal judgements—the most extraordinary being the most ordinary, too—shaping our everyday lives, most especially and egregiously the lives of Aboriginal people. The authors give the example of ‘R v Murrell of 1836, in which the court held that English law extended to Aboriginal people on the paradoxical basis that English common law applied in New South Wales because, until colonisation, uninhabited’ (32). Field’s template for beginning, not unlike my dream, was structured by bathos and loopy bureaucracy, and by a deep sense of something unsaid.
Indeed, as Ford and Clemens emphasise, the important point about Field’s instrumentalisation of terra nullius was never its truth nor its actuality, but its mode of enunciation: critically, Field never used the term. The then-current phrase, ‘desert and inhabited’, was a blank filled in by legal reasoning compiled later in London by Samuel Shepherd and Robert Gifford, the highest legal authorities of Britain. That Field may be named ‘as nonetheless responsible’ is a claim the authors justify in ‘that the matrix of citations he presented in his argument was so tightly constructed as to make visible and even unmistakable’ (36) what it left carefully unnamed. From 1819, something unsaid was no longer necessarily the absence of discourse. The unsaid—silence—had become a property:
Not saying something; keeping silent; erasing or effacing it; burying it in the references: these were now discursive ways of making it happen, of bringing it about. Field was the first to perform the terra nullius operation, which he did with absolute exemplarity precisely because he left it to others to perform, having shown exactly what they must do … he made it speak, originally, through silence as well as through law and its administrations of violence. (36)
If the case for continuity between my Melbourne morning in 2023, Bourke’s Proclamation of 1835 and Bent’s unpaid tolls in 1819 seems ill-described, if not ill-founded, I’m afraid that’s because I’ve missed a connection between the priority of the outdoors, property and the rhetorical culture in Australia that draws it all together. How did property as we know and prioritise it become possible here, if we have always known that terra nullius was a fiction (and we now know that it was a legal instrument without precedent in international law)? There was never a vacant land. But, as Ford and Clemens write, these impediments (logical, empirical, legal, ethical) did in no way impede the rise of terra nullius, which swiftly formed the basis for how all future laws were to be written. The idea that this was no one’s land became the determining instrument and the constitutive authority upon which all subsequent legislation would be based. What the continuity rests on is a kind of authority we don’t understand very well. It was not the autocratic, economic authority of the penal colony, nor was it the traditional nor legal authority of the Crown. This was the authority of poetry, the property-raising ‘transformed silence,’ as Ford and Clemens describe it, working in ‘its performativity, retrospectivity, nostrocentric settlerism and progressive utopianism’ (36).
In other words, for British colonial law to work, the law needed a poet. Ringing in my head, though I wish I could leave it unsaid, is the absurdity of Field literalising Percy Bysshe Shelley’s claim that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’ The passage of this statement from poetic credo to biographical fact rubs me wrongly, violating a romantic idea (probably derived from a Romantic Idea) of lonely poets sitting on rocky cliffs, penning wild verses while contemplating wild seas. W. B. Yeats held the disjunction between law and poetry into the twentieth century when he said this: ‘we make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.’ But I don’t know how thinkable this opposition really is. Augustus, renovating Rome from brick to marble, expressed an important alignment between poetry and legislation in the very architecture of his home on Palatine Hill: Domus Augusti was connected by a series of corridors to the Temple of Apollo, the portico of which held a library for the city’s poets to research and write their poems. As Kieran Dolin has written, Renaissance England expressed a similar continuity: the proximity of the Inns of Court to the London theatres and Fleet Street fostered a rhetorical culture in which law and literature were linked through personal contact as well as textual transmission. ⑫ (As it happens, Field learned the law at Inner Temple, the same training ground as Sir Edward Coke, who centuries before argued that judges do not create laws but simply ‘enunciate’ existing ones. Coke’s argument in the 1608 Calvin’s Case was used to justify the doctrine of discovery in the English Courts on the question of the Crown’s rights to the lands and resources of North America. ⑬)
I looked at a few maps when I was preparing this review—maps of Augustan Rome, maps of Renaissance London, and maps of early nineteenth century Sydney. I couldn’t see any theatres in John Septimus Roe’s 1822 ‘Plan of the Town and Suburbs of Sydney’, though I found a Robert Jordan book that suggests the first permanent convict theatre was built in 1796 on Windmill Hill, watching over the illicit lanes of the Rocks. ⑭ Looking at Roe’s 1822 map, I see that Government House and the Judge’s Residence are close neighbours. Even if there were theatres at the time, the fact they were not among the cartographer's priorities (unlike the armouries and prisons) suggests something, or rather, two things. Rhetorical culture that linked law and literature was no longer a matter of convivial collocation, but rather a matter housed in the head of individual persons (such as the avid poetry-head, Field). Field had been an acolyte of Wordsworth; maybe this declaration from the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads rang in his head as he sat at his desk at his Judge’s residence in Sydney town, his head embodying a virtual collocation of poetry and the law in a globalising world:
[Poetry’s ‘object’ was to be] truth, not individual and local, but general and operative; not standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion; truth which is its own testimony, which gives strength and divinity to the tribunal to which it appeals, and receives them from the same tribunal. ⑮
Poetry and law were no longer connected in the geographical Western sense that had become customary, but brought together in new ways, precisely by their strange splitting, at once utterly internalised and utterly global, rhetorically strung out between the colonial town and the proper city of the home country. It was the Romantic Idea of the individual poet, the body in the landscape versifying his singular vision, that placed poetry in the highest authority, generalisable to all and answerable to no external authority. Or, as Ford and Clemens do it, in their outstanding foregrounding of Field’s autopoeisis:
The truths of poetry, for Wordsworth, involve a looping of legal statements so that they become autopoietic, which is to say: self-grounding and self-generative. In other words: poetry writes the laws it follows, which is how it tells properly self-evident truths … Wordsworth’s doctrine had been carried alive into his heard by passion, and he practices a version of it in ‘Botany-Bay Flowers.’ (91)
In their stunning reading of ‘Botany-Bay Flowers,’ the authors drive us to the heart of Field’s poem, Queen Mab’s dominion (the Shakespeare-stanning Field leans heavily here on A Midsummer Night’s Dream.)
But I incline to the opinion
That we are now in her dominion;
And we dream those self-same dreams,
Which (from Mercutio) it seems
We owe to Mab’s deliv’rancy,
As midwife and queen faery (ll.91-98)
Placed thus, Australia is always already part of ‘poetic England’—we dream those self-same dreams:
And this proof that Australia is English, because it was dreamt of in England’s dreaming, is presented poetically as a truth that need not stand upon any external testimony. For the fact that this truth is revealed in a dream, rather than controverting its legitimacy, instead confirms it. (96)
I truly mean the following statements: this is an awesome book; and yet, I probably still don’t understand the authors’ fullest implications of how Australia began, with law and poetry in step under the punning poetic feet of Field. This is not humility topos (though it may be sleep-deprived topos), nor is it a comment about the prose here, which on every page courageously commits to the reader’s comprehension of Field’s profound legacy of dispossession. As well as a powerful examination of the intersection of law and poetry in the workings of settlement, the book is also extremely funny, with the stylistic yielding to the collaborators’ inner poeticisms—see for instance the description of imperial Romantic sociability as a ‘far-flung homosocial community of moralising male middle managers’—as charming as they are convincing.
The book leaves me with a valuable new way to think about the contradictions of settlement—the ‘yeah, nah,’ the having it both ways, the paving of the path to Federation—that have long puzzled me. Along with the squatters’ dismissal of Bourke’s Proclamation as they claimed land whose unexploited resources they felt entitled to, other examples of Australian culture attempting to have it both ways includes the settler historical attitude to the past (as in, yeah, our present is continuous with the Gallipoli legend; but nah, we had nothing to do with the Stolen Generations, all that was ages ago). As Ford and Clemens write, the 1819 question ‘conquest or settlement?’ was legally resolved by Field’s answer, ‘settlement.’ But the juncture of law and poetry, ‘[c]onsidered semiotically, as a distinction drawn between indiscernibles, and as an identity effected within an apparent opposition … has the structure of the colonial pun’ (86). This pun produced and accounted for the real and enacted answer: ‘both.’
3. SFINDILIS AGAIN
Why did I begin this way? What were the continuities between that coffee I’d been walking for, dodging the property-heads along the way, feeling my bad mood redirect itself outward to the apparent priorities of the nation: getting jacked on the global affect (hustle, psychic conformity) and getting out of the way of property concerns (concrete, literally concrete, poured slowly, inexorably wrongly, and poured again). Small and big business confluent in one tight intersection. In a beautiful literalisation of whatever the metaphor for the collocation of rhetoric and property was about to be, my path was crossed by a local man I have been obsessed with for the past six months. Sfindilis, let’s call him (for that is his name): Agent of the Year at the nearby branch of Barry Plant, where he wears an always-recent haircut, a too-tight blue suit and pointy leather loafers his Zippo lighter and his takeaway cup of coffee always on hand. The point of Sfindilis, and the point of the colonial culture we share with him, it strikes me the moment I see him flip his Zippo, is absolutely economic. Later, it strikes me that the point of the culture is also absolutely poetic. Personhood is understood by the prospect of financial improvement; it is also understood by the prospect of cultural improvement: cultivation. Hence the haircut, the shoes, and the words, words, words. I like that I saw Sfindilis at this moment, his buoyancy reminding me that some of his time is spent writing, like his anti-peer in yours truly. Specifically, we happen to produce strange stabs of prose, both of us leaning heavily on repetitions, hyperbolic parataxis, wild modes of address. Let’s call these things prose poems, and let’s call the Agent of the Year the people’s poet. No other form of poetry is more familiar to the Australian reading audience, more widely read and better understood, not only for what is said but importantly for what is not said, than the 150-200 word copy that flogs real estate:
Life's a joyful breeze with this easy-care, modern apartment promising the ultimate lifestyle defined by integrated living, contemporary finishes, quality inclusions and a vibrant, inner suburban postcode. The perfect set up for first home buyers and investors looking to secure comfort and convenience in a vibrant pocket. The complex also provides access to a rooftop with barbecue facilities, garden and outstanding views.
Comprising open plan living, a stylish kitchen boasting a Hafele oven and dishwasher, 2 bedrooms with mirrored built-in robes, a floor to ceiling tiled, designer bathroom and 2 toilets, a sophisticated powder room and smart euro laundry. Prioritising the outdoors, the floor plan allows for 2 balconies plus a terrace courtyard, efficiently extending the apartment's overall living space. Featuring a Daikin inverter, storage cage and car space.
Centrally positioned just 6kms from the CBD with Sydney Road delights at your door and within walking proximity to trams, Anstey Station, Clifton Park and Lygon Street shops, cafes and bars. Situated near quality schools, Barkly Square, CERES and Merri Creek Trail.
The repetition of ‘vibrant’ lends the piece a notable internal rhythm; there is also a nod to poetic precedent in the reference to ‘open plan living’, to proximity to cafes. It is a poem because it studiously instaures every prior advertisement for an open plan apartment as poetry. It is a poem; not a good poem, but good poetry is not the subject of this piece of writing. ‘Imagine,’ I ask you, what he’d write if he were selling ‘vacant land’: sky’s the limit, let your imagination run wild. That the apartment advertised here happens to be close to the location where Batman ‘negotiated’ the land sale with representatives of the Kulin people, somewhere around present-day Northcote along the Merri Creek Trail doesn’t make it into the Sfindilis poem despite the glowing report that the property ‘prioritis[es] the outdoors.’ Why would it include that history, and, more importantly, why does this non-continuity with the past completely not surprise: why would anyone remark on what is no less than the business as usual here, the business of forgetting. Business as usual, where the resident reader is always the apostrophic and optimal You of the Future. Chris Healy might describe the banality of this non-continuity within the national structure of forgetting (Aboriginal people). ⑯ Ford and Clemens hold this in the structure of the bad colonial pun. In property poetry, the You of the Future needn't be concerned with any of that. I want to add to this my long-held suspicion that settler colonies’ evident obsession with home renovation expresses a deeply held anxiety around owning; we seem to be a country preoccupied by the question, are we owners? To paraphrase Anacreon (another literary source enjoyed by Field), we own and we own not. Would more labour prove ownership? Our interminable mixing of labour with property (quite literally, DIY every weekend under the surveillance of Bunnings) feels indicative of a certain truth: we are never sure about the basis for the home of our dreams.
✷✷✷
footnotes
✷ 1. I loved Alex McClintock’s likening of the global ubiquity of the Australian cafe to the Irish pub.
✷ 2. Niel Black, Diary, 9 December 1839; cited in Ian D. Clark, ‘Scars in the Landscape: A Register of Massacre Sites in Western Victoria, 1803-1859,’ Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Report Series (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 1995), 1.
✷ 3. Sir Richard Bourke, ‘Proclamation of Governor Bourke, 10 October 1835,’ Colonial Office of the British Government, National Archives of the United Kingdom. Viewable at Museum of Australian Democracy.
✷ 4. Thomas H. Ford and Justin Clemens, Barron Field in New South Wales: The Poetics of Terra Nullius (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2023). Subsequent citations in-text.
✷ 5. Fiona Allon, Renovation Nation: Our Obsession with Home (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2008).
✷6. To think through the fiction, some may think with their ears. Listen to the phrase ‘terra nullius’ and tell me what you hear. I hear ‘terror’ and feel this homophone has been retrospectively expressive of the dread brought on in the European viewer of uncultivated land. According to Mary Perera, in the key texts of colonial discourse—she cites Robinson Crusoe—‘the spectacle of apparently untenanted land provokes an “ontological dread”; [such land is seen as] an adversary and volatile entity that needs to be subordinated.’ The terror of terra nullius was the sublime terror of waste. ‘Wast’, John Locke called it: land that had not been put to use in some ‘productive’ way (ideally the most extractive of ways, as in agricultural or mining endeavours that continue to pass for cultural purpose in Australia) was waste land, and thus an abomination to God, who, at least according to Locke, had gifted land to humans for them to make use of. ‘Don’t waste it!’ thought Locke, thinking the thought of God. This idea underwrites Locke’s labour theory of property, the notion that by mixing labour with land a transformation occurs under which the commons becomes the property of the labouring person. ‘Thus Labour, in the Beginning’, Locke famously wrote, ‘gave a Right of Property’. Though Locke’s labour theory of property rights has been extensively criticised for its logical and ethical deficiencies, the principle has had a lasting effect on how relationships between land and humans are arranged throughout the modern world. Locke’s theory also effectively locked anyone who didn’t already have rights—critically, rights derived from property holding—out of his recursive formula for who a ‘person’ is. As such, to briefly turn to other British colonial sites (such as those in the Caribbean), the labour of slaves could establish no rights to property. The labour theory of property also prioritised certain forms of labour over others in the cultivation of property rights. Because Locke’s theory privileged resource-centric labour that extracted the highest material value from land this also gave justification to imperial dispossession of land inhabited by First Peoples, who instead of maximising the extraction of resources, performed caretaking labour of the land and waters in observance of the deeper Law, holding that the land and waters had rights to be protected and voices to be heard.
✷7. Amy Ripley, ‘John Olsen: The Last of Australia’s Great Generation of Artists’, Sydney Morning Herald, 11 April 2023.
✷ 8. For detailed examinations of White Indigeneity and Australian nativist discourse, see Julie Mullaney, ‘New Labours, Older Nativisms? Australian Critical Whiteness Studies, Indigeneity and David Malouf’s Harland’s Half Acre,’ Journal of Commonwealth Literature 42.1 (2007), 97-116; Ian McLean, White Aborigines: Identity Politics in Australian Art (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998); and Terrie Goldie, Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian and New Zealand Literature (Montreal: McGill-Queens UP, 1989). For a discussion that compares examples of settler nativism with a possible alternative, see Lucy Van and Anne Maxwell, ‘Camera, Colony, Künstlerroman: Photography in Three Australian Novels,’ Journal of Australian Studies 42.1 (2017), 116-130.
✷ 9. Anne Poelina, Stephen Muecke and Sandy Toussaint, ‘A Martuwarra Serpent Stirs in Its Sleep … Enduring Creation Stories in a Time of Crisis’, Griffith Review 80 (2023), 36-43.
✷ 10. Poelina, 39.
✷ 11. Poelina, 39.
✷ 12. Kieran Dolin, A Critical Introduction to Law and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 80.
✷ 13. For the bearing of this on the settlement of Australia, see Merete Borch, ‘Rethinking the Origins of Terra Nullius,’ Australian Historical Studies 32 (2001), 229-39.
✷ 14. John Septimus Roe, ‘Plan of the Town and Suburbs of Sydney 1822,’ [cartographic material], State Library of New South Wales,; Robert Jordan, The Convict Theatres of Early Australia (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2003).
✷15. William Wordsworth, ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’, The Prose Works of William Wordsworth: Volume 1, ed. W.J.B. Owen and J.W. Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 163; cited in Ford and Clemens, 90.
✷16. Chris Healy, Forgetting Aborigines, (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2008).
Lucy Van writes poetry and essays. Her poetry has appeared in publications including Debris, Cordite Poetry Review, Australian Poetry Journal, The Suburban Review, Rabbit, Axon and Best of Australian Poems. Her first poetry collection, The Open, was longlisted for the Stella prize, shortlisted for the Mary Gilmore award, and highly commended in the Anne Elder award. Read our interview about The Open here.