Surveying local writing in 1866, George Barton judged Charles Harpur to have ‘laid the foundation stone of our national poetry.’ It was a foundational moment for Australian literary institutions more generally. Barton was the newly appointed Reader in English Literature at Sydney University, the first such post in Australian higher education. Through Henry Parkes’s Empire and other periodicals, meanwhile, he was part of the broader convergence of literary journalism with nationalist agitation that would underpin the Federation movement. For Australian literary studies from Barton to the present, Australian poetry has begun, canonically, with Harpur. Which is also roughly how he saw himself.
Such foundations pose problems, however—both for those who lay them and for the critics who come after. To be a nation, Australia needed a national poet. But that poet equally needed a nation: an Australia he could be the national poet of. Outlining the difficulty in institutional terms, Barton declared that there was in fact no national literature to speak of in the colonies: ‘there is no such literature here.’ Neither local taste nor local publishing was up to the task; no one could practice literature as a profession; the social and material infrastructures required for a national literature simply didn’t exist. So on the one hand, Harpur was the national poet. And on the other, there was no such thing. In this paper, I look at Harpur’s anti-squatter satires of the 1840s as registering and responding to these impossible institutional circumstances.
Thomas H. Ford is a historian of literature in society. He is Senior Lecturer in English and an ARC Future Fellow at La Trobe University. He writes about poetry of diverse kinds: good poems and bad poems, new poems and old poems, canonical poems and forgotten poems. He also writes about Romanticism, critical and aesthetic theories, the environmental humanities and Australia, amongst other topics. His most recent book is Barron Field in New South Wales (Melbourne UP, 2023), which he co-authored with Justin Clemens. His other books include How to Read a Poem: Seven Steps (Routledge, 2021) and Wordsworth and the Poetics of Air (Cambridge UP, 2018).