Field’s Kangaroo

Spare a thought for “The Kangaroo,” a most intriguing poem by Barron Field, judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales from 1817 to 1824, doubtless not the first poem written on Australian soil, but one of two in what was most likely the first book of poetry published in the colony of New South Wales, a slim volume called First Fruits of Australian Poetry, printed by the government printer, George Howe, in 1819, and republished by his son (George having since died of the dropsy) in an expanded edition in 1823.

Although it has occasionally found defenders, “The Kangaroo” has been much maligned.¹ The desire to display it in anthologies of Australian poetry has come and gone. Mitchell and Kramer, for example, in their Oxford Anthology of Australian Literature (1985), chose to pass over it, as did Gray and Lehmann in Australian Poetry Since 1788 (2011).  Although the poem does contain awkward lines, its principal crime seems to have been to rhyme “Australia” with “failure,” though on the one hand it’s hard to see as a crime a rhyme so often and so ruefully quoted, as if it contained a deep, sad truth, and on the other the poem is far from arguing a connection between Australia and failure. Indeed, this preemptive and adventitious misreading, usurping the poem at the outset, denies us a most curious poetic jewel: a rough diamond, but diamond, nevertheless. Field is, in fact, saying something quite different, and in its intellectual engagement with its subject, the poem represents a rather extraordinary achievement. In its struggle with the concept of the kangaroo we get an index of the whole initial and much-protracted intellectual encounter with Australia, in short the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Western mind’s encounter with its other. More than enough, surely, to earn the poem a permanent place in the bleak, troubled, betimes quite gothic, dawn of Australian writing.