Middleton Grange sits on a tract of land once owned by a judge of the NSW Supreme Court, also known as the author of the first book of poetry published in Australia.
Barron Field (1786-1846) was living in England when he was appointed a Supreme Court judge in May 1816. Travelling to Australia with his newly-wedded wife Jane, née Cairncross, Field reached Sydney in February 1817 in the female convict ship Lord Melville. Governor Lachlan Macquarie was at first ‘very much prejudiced in his favour by his mild, modest, and conciliating manners’, and was ‘persuaded that he [would] prove a great acquisition and blessing to this Colony’.
When he arrived in Sydney, Field received a big grant of land, 2000 acres (809 ha) in what was then known as Cabramatta. The land, called ‘Hinchinbrook’ occupied a significant portion of the suburb of Middleton Grange – you can see Field’s tract of land on the Cabramatta Parish Map of the area.
As found on the Cabramatta Parish Map c19th century
Barron Field’s poetry
Barron Field pursued many interests outside of the practice of Law. Before leaving England he had established a name as something of a literary and theatrical critic. In 1819, two year’s after arriving in Sydney, Field published a book of poems called First Fruits of Australian Poetry. A selection of verses from that publication is available for download under the title The Kangaroo and Other Poems. First Fruits is a significant publication in that it was the first verse compositions to appear in Australia in book form (the Australian Dictionary of Biography notes that Michael Robinson had written before him, but not in a published form).
Field was only to live in Sydney for some 11 years, before accepting the post of advocate-fiscal in Ceylon in 1828.
Were Field’s compositions any good? Several critics have dismissed them as doggerel, others have enlarged on their merits. Kangaroo is Field’s best known poem, reproduced in part below.
‘Kangaroo’
Kanagaroo, Kangaroo!
Thou Spirit of Australia,
That redeems from utter failure,
From perfect desolation,
And warrants the creation
Of this fifth part of the Earth,
Which would seem an after-birth,
Not conceiv’d in the Beginning
(For GOD bless’d His work at first,
And saw that it was good),
But emerg’d at the first sinning,
When the ground was therefore curst;
And hence this barren wood!
The poem reveals the extent to which new immigrants to Australia struggled to come to terms with the foreign landscape they found themselves in. As Peter Conrad suggested in his 2004 Boyer Lecture, Field wanted to say that Australia was not a failure, but he found it hard to convince himself. Rather, he found Australia unpicturesque, unmusical, and he found it difficult to comprehend the kangaroo, which he thought something like a cross between squirrel and deer:
… howsoever anomalous,
Thou art not yet incongruous,
Repugnant or preposterous.
Just as visual artists struggled to define the exotic form of the Australian marsupial, so Field’s Kangaroo speaks of the alienation many early settlers experienced when they first moved to the colony, unable to reconcile their experience of European animals such as deers and rodents with these strange beasts they now found before them.
Seen below is the very first European depiction of a Kangaroo, published with the journals of Cook’s first voyage to Australia.
'Kanguroo' by George Stubbs, c1773
You can find out more about Barron Field through the Australian Dictionary of Biography.
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