Which brings us, finally, to our second postscript. In the second sonnet, Field describes the colony as ‘discordant’ yet ‘big with virtues,’ and as a landscape in which the scenes depicted in the Great Seal have been realised – rising habitations, a fort for their defence – before concluding with a line taken from Virgil’s Georgics – ‘So fairest Rome became’ – with the original Latin given in a footnote.¹ The line cited here by Field is the very next line following the one that formed the motto on the Great Seal of New South Wales. He cites the next line very deliberately so as to cancel and surpass the existing citation of the line before. Not Etruria, but Rome. Not New South Wales, but Australia. Not the allegory of emancipist labour, but the literature of Romantic irony. Not the art of forgers and the poetry of convicts, but an aesthetics of legitimate and liberal settlement. Not the closed economic circularity of coinage and seals, but an enduring and four-square declaration of idealised enlightenment origins in the disinterested ‘pursuit of knowledge.’ Not makeshift accommodations with Aboriginal people, but a program of extermination. For the colony to rise like Christ it had first, in its existing form, to be declared legally dead, and so placed definitively under erasure, felony attaint.

Field’s dialectics of colonialism repeatedly cycled through this sequence of erasures: cancellation-of-the-existent; self-conscious-catachresis; auto-cancellation. These colonial operations depended on installing a resistance to literality: the ‘literal’ aspects of the territory (which encompasses both the flowers as well as the science that purports to know them) came to be figured by Field as already-fantastic (that is, swarming with fairies and poetry) in order to establish a polity for which facts – above all those of dispossession and punishment – were no longer determining constraints for political action. Once such a transmogrification was accomplished, the projected settlers-to-come might manage to conceive and build a new polity – a new kind of polity – in the no-longer foreign land on the grounds not only of reality but also of the poetic imagination itself. This resurrection – the real first fruits of a Christian civilisation – would entail effacing all the images of convict possession and Indigenous dispossession, and it would require the transumption of medallions and seals into an everlasting brass memorial fixed between land and sea, bolted to the coastal stones and equally unloosed into the mobility of print publication. It was a powerfully modernising operation, and one that allows Field to be identified, we want to propose, as the first legislator of whatever modernity would eventually turn out to be in that poetically framed nation called ‘Australia.’