This remained true even – perhaps especially – for a colony that was essentially nothing but a pure expression of penal law. Accordingly, a device for the First Seal of New South Wales was presented to King George III on 4 August 1790, and an engraved Territorial Seal was received by Governor King on 22 September 1791.¹ The Seal was to be used not just ‘for granting Pardons Absolutely or Conditionally,’ that is, for the emancipation of convicts, but for all legal matters concerning the colony, including grants of land, as can be seen in Figure 3, which shows the Seal appended to a land title deed. In the Parliamentary Act authorising the Seal, the design was described as follows:

Convicts landed at Botany Bay; their fetters taken off and received by Industry sitting on a bale of goods, with her attributes, the distaff, beehive, pick-axe, and spade, pointing to oxen ploughing, the rising habitations, and a church on a hill at a distance, with a fort for their defence. Motto: Sic fortis Etruria crevit.²

Figure 3: Wax impression of first Great Seal of NSW, Detail from Edward Varndell – Land Grant, 22 Feb. 1792, and associated transfer document, 24 Jan. 1830, State Library of NSW.

Two points. The first is the introduction into the original allegorical narrative of emancipation – ‘their fetters taken off.’ Hope has been replaced by the hard labour of Industry. The second is the motto, taken from Virgil’s Georgics, in which Etruria, the classicising brand-name given by Wedgwood to his factory, has now been transferred to the colony itself. The motto means: this is how Etruria grew strong. Or in other words: Arbeit macht frei.

That new narrative of emancipation was repeatedly instantiated in the use of the Great Seal, which conferred legitimacy, as a kind of signature, to documents enacting the sovereign decisions of the Governor. The two documents it most frequently authorised were grants of land and pardons. Legally, then, it was employed primarily to realise the messages that were embossed upon it: the conversion of convicted criminals into emancipated workers; and the alienation of Aboriginal land into private agricultural holdings in cultivating which emancipists would cultivate both themselves and their new society. Thus Etruria grew strong; thus we hope to prosper – as the adapted motto on the masthead of the colony’s first newspaper, The Sydney Gazette, put it, as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Masthead of the Sydney Gazette, March 5, 1803, State Library of NSW

This is where Field re-enters the story. The Great Seal of New South Wales legitimated the pardons and certificates of emancipation that restored to convicts the status of civil personality. In law, convicted felons were subject to ‘felony attaint,’ which is to say: they were civilly dead; they could not appear in court, nor own property, nor enter into any legally binding contract. They had no legal status as agential subjects. That status was returned to them upon pardon, but only if that pardon had been duly passed under the Great Seal of England. In New South Wales, this legal principle was not followed: the Great Seal of New South Wales was understood as having delegated authority, and on that basis emancipists could be fully involved in the colony’s legal and economic life if their pardons bore the local Seal.

But a case decided in England in 1819, Bullock v. Dodds, imperilled that makeshift arrangement. When Bullock, an ex-convict who had returned to Britain, tried to sue Dodds to enforce payment of a bill, Dodds’s successful defence was that Bullock had no standing – was incapable of acting as plaintiff – because his pardon was only an informal Governor’s pardon, bearing the Great Seal of New South Wales, rather than the Great Seal of England, as was legally required. The very narrative embossed on the New South Wales Seal was then shown to be fraudulent: emancipists remained attainted; they were all still civilly dead. That ruling need not have disturbed relations in New South Wales, where they were well-established workarounds to accommodate colonial divergences from strict application of English laws. But in a series of cases in 1820-21, Field seized on the precedent established by Bullock v. Dodds to rule any such makeshift accommodation invalid. Like his ruling on tax and like his poetry, this was another way of striking a blow at Macquarie’s regime, of cancelling the existing mode of emancipist colonial activity, of realigning legal, political and aesthetic norms in the colony with those prevailing in England, and so of inscribing in place of the existing penal colony a new mode of settlement, liberal, progressive and law-governed.³ It was, as we suggested in underlining the New Testament meaning of ‘first fruits,’ a full-scale dialectical Aufhebung. And it entailed a new mode of geo-inscription – the writing of English literature and law across the landscape.

Seals share their shape and substance with medallions and coins. This state of affairs is perhaps peculiarly significant for Australian history from 1788 for singular reasons. After all, as Helen Hughes has recently emphasised in an essay discussing the Charlotte Medal – usually considered the first artwork ever made in settler Australia – the early visual arts in New South Wales (including Van Diemen’s Land, which was then administratively a part of that colony) were almost entirely the work of convicted counterfeiters such as Thomas Watling, Joseph Lycett and Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, amongst many others. This meant that ‘what was a crime in England became a foundation stone for Western art on the Australian continent.’⁴ With the rapid growth in the quantity of paper bills of exchange and associated economic documentation in Britain in the eighteenth-century, forgery was increasingly becoming a middle-class crime – a certain level of literacy and learning being necessary for such activities – and accordingly educated and artistically trained convicts often found themselves sharing a fate with those members of the lumpenproletariat shipped to Botany Bay for such crimes as coin-clipping. Indeed, the first official Australian currency ever – the so-called Holey Dollar and Dump, which went into circulation in 1814, and is shown in Figure 5 – was created by the forger William Henshall on Governor Macquarie’s instructions. In 1812, Macquarie had 40,000 Spanish reales imported, from which Henshall punched out the centre, thereby creating two levels of coinage. One could hardly ask for a better allegory of Australian settler art, ‘inaugurated’ as it was, as Hughes puts it, ‘by a form of iconoclasm,’⁵ and almost entirely bound up with imperialising monetary antics.