Agent of the Year
Lucy Van on Ford & Clemens
1. SFINDILIS TAKES A COFFEE
The project manager of this apartment building and I have been making embarrassed eye contact for nearly twelve months. A few more workers look at the man digging into the recently finished wall. They are all holding takeaway coffee cups. This apartment building is the fourth of the four apartment blocks that have gone up on each corner of the intersection between two main roads here, settling some matter that concerns us all but interests only the passionate few: the density heads, the development heads, the anti-density heads, the anti-development heads. At the heart of it all is how to make a home and how to make money, a double helix that continually cancels its own building block to life.
What is life in Melbourne? Melbourne, settled in 1835, despite the Proclamation urging otherwise—made that same year by the Governor of the Colony of New South Wales, Governor Bourke, who sought to settle the matter of the wild land grabbing going on south of the Great Dividing Range by squatters. Squatters were absolutely going for it, taking up their runs for grazing sheep and cattle all over what was to become Victoria. ‘Taking up a run’ is an interesting phrase that Niel Black, a contemporary of the energetic late-1830s squatters, once parsed for posterity like this:
The best way [to take up a run] is to go outside and take up a new run, provided the conscience of the party is sufficiently seared to enable him without remorse to slaughter natives right and left. It is universally and distinctly understood that the chances are very small indeed of a person taking up a new run being able to maintain possession of his place and property without having recourse to such means — sometimes by wholesale … ② Niel Black, Diary, 9 December 1839, cited in Ian D. Clark, ‘Scars in the Landscape: A Register of Massacre Sites in Western Victoria, 1803-1859’, in Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Report Series (Aboriginal Studies Press for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 1995), 1.
Taking up a run. A genteel saying of something (killing Aboriginal people) without the saying of anything much, sounding to heritage-trained ears indistinguishable from other folksy terms for rural property management. Business as usual, then: both the reference and the referent essential, it seems, to the basis for the high society wealth of the state of Victoria, of which Melbourne is the apotheosis. Never forget that by 1840, after the failure of the first Aboriginal Mission administered by George Langhorne at the site where the Royal Botanical Gardens now grow (in 1837 Langhorne’s brother, Alfred, had taken up a run on the land essentially continuous with this site at the now preeminent heritage site, Como House, owned from 1864 by the illustrious pastoralists, the Armytage Family; Como House now exhibits the unreconstructed glories of Victoria’s ‘stately’ colonial past, and houses the headquarters of Heritage Australia, Victoria), the settlement was declared by the next Governor of New South Wales, Sir George Gipps, and the first Superintendent of the Port Phillip District, Charles La Trobe, a no-go zone for the Woi Wurrung and Boon Wurrung peoples, an exclusion to be administered by Chief Protector Augustus Robinson ostensibly to ‘protect’ First Peoples from the badnesses of the burgeoning colonial city. Strange interpretations of ‘protection’ ensued.
Now: ‘settle’ is a word I have just used in some variation. Strange word: to fix (what is uncertain), to decide (a question); to furnish a place with inhabitants (i.e., ‘settlers’); to subject permanently to regulations, to set permanently in order, to place on a permanent footing (institutions and government). In the Oxford English Dictionary: to quiet, tranquilise, compose; to sink; to recover from drink; to quiet with a blow. To finish.
2. NOBODY LIKES TOLLS
What I am also doing when I shift the story across 1835 and below the Great Dividing Range is trying my hardest to understand something that continues to puzzle me. If the considerable area of land stolen by squatters was in violation of Bourke’s decree, which leant utterly on the doctrine of terra nullius passed into law by Field, how was the doctrine, in its constitutional form, materially significant to the Australians who were subject to that law? Taking the instance of Port Phillip District as exemplary, it seems to me that the idea of terra nullius in an ambient sense mattered a great deal; while in a specific legal sense, it was not much of a great deal at all.
While I was reading Barron Field, I had a dream. I was in the flat where my friend, the poet George Mouratidis, lives. George was nowhere to be seen, but I had a feeling something bad was about to happen to him there. Someone had broken into his home, and they were looking for something, a receipt maybe. I was waving a piece of paper I had found there, insisting on its bearing on the intrusion. It was a matter of great urgency but, as with all dreams, that matter remained unsettled. Looking back at the dream I can’t help but see myself as intruder, and that the receipt I was waving was not George’s, but my own, the very receipt I had broken in to look for. The day after I dreamt this, I read an article by Anne Poelina, Stephen Muecke and Sandy Toussaint, ‘A Martuwarra Serpent Stirs in Its Sleep’, in the new issue of the Griffith Review. There is a beautiful passage in it about a dream that helps me abide with, if not understand, my own:
One of us had a dream while we were writing this story. Stephen dreamed that he destroyed the Martuwarra, what the kartiya (non-Aboriginal people) called the Fitzroy River Valley after one of their early explorers. He dreamed that, digging his thumbnails into a seam, he just broke the country open like a piece of cake falling apart. Shadows crowd our minds and hearts.
The police came to see him then. In the dream, Stephen said, ‘You can’t arrest me. There’s no law against destroying the Fitzroy River. There’s no law against destroying the planet either!’ ⑨ Anne Poelina, Stephen Muecke and Sandy Toussaint, ‘A Martuwarra Serpent Stirs in Its Sleep … Enduring Creation Stories in a Time of Crisis’, Griffith Review, no. 80 (2023): 39.
That’s right, Field, then Bourke, then every other legislator in the country would say. That’s wrong, the River would say. The Martuwarra already had law, has law, and this was Stephen Muecke’s dream, which heard by its key reversal ‘the reality of Customary Law… the principles that guide, teach, restore and care for all living things.’ ⑩ Poelina et al., ‘A Martuwarra Serpent Stirs in Its Sleep’, 39. No, I don’t want to interpret my dream here, but I do feel the stirring of a few elements that have a retrospective expression to them—waving a paper, insisting on the (in)justice of something paid or unpaid, unsure of whether the poet had granted me permission to enter his home. Or rather, unsure whether I was supposed to pay to enter, and if so, what that payment should be. It’s a joke without a setup (so I give none) that the basis of Field’s legal opinion—that the colony was settled and not conquered— came about because he had to deal with the issue of his predecessor, Judge Bent’s unpaid and overdue road tolls. These had been raised at a collection point where George Street met Parramatta Road, at an extravagant tollgate devised by then Governor Macquarie and built in 1819—again, the decisive year.
Fuck Macquarie, said Bent, as the unpaid road toll notices piled up at his office at the Supreme Court, or more likely, in the library of his Judge’s Residence (near present-day Bent Street), not far from Government House (the current site of the Museum of Sydney). What was in dispute was whether Macquarie had the legal authority to raise a tax here in the colony, and if so, under which authority. Ford and Clemens go into the legal histories that align at this moment in satisfying and lucid detail—the short version, Field found, could be reduced to an either/or formula:
1. If the colony was conquered territory, the Governor, acting for the King, possessed authority to tax as he chose
2. If the colony was settled (i.e., as territory where there was no one to conquer), subjects could only be taxed by legislative assembly
In order to install proper constitutional order, and probably to avoid the situation in America, an ‘object lesson in how not to set up a colony’ (32), New South Wales was placed in the second category, setting in store a new common law that underpinned the most extraordinary legal judgements—the most extraordinary being the most ordinary, too—shaping our everyday lives, most especially and egregiously the lives of Aboriginal people. The authors give the example of ‘R v Murrell of 1836, in which the court held that English law extended to Aboriginal people on the paradoxical basis that English common law applied in New South Wales because, until colonisation, uninhabited’ (32). Field’s template for beginning, not unlike my dream, was structured by bathos and loopy bureaucracy, and by a deep sense of something unsaid.
Indeed, as Ford and Clemens emphasise, the important point about Field’s instrumentalisation of terra nullius was never its truth nor its actuality, but its mode of enunciation: critically, Field never used the term. The then-current phrase, ‘desert and inhabited’, was a blank filled in by legal reasoning compiled later in London by Samuel Shepherd and Robert Gifford, the highest legal authorities of Britain. That Field may be named ‘as nonetheless responsible’ is a claim the authors justify in ‘that the matrix of citations he presented in his argument was so tightly constructed as to make visible and even unmistakable’ (36) what it left carefully unnamed. From 1819, something unsaid was no longer necessarily the absence of discourse. The unsaid—silence—had become a property:
Not saying something; keeping silent; erasing or effacing it; burying it in the references: these were now discursive ways of making it happen, of bringing it about. Field was the first to perform the terra nullius operation, which he did with absolute exemplarity precisely because he left it to others to perform, having shown exactly what they must do … he made it speak, originally, through silence as well as through law and its administrations of violence. (36)
If the case for continuity between my Melbourne morning in 2023, Bourke’s Proclamation of 1835 and Bent’s unpaid tolls in 1819 seems ill-described, if not ill-founded, I’m afraid that’s because I’ve missed a connection between the priority of the outdoors, property and the rhetorical culture in Australia that draws it all together. How did property as we know and prioritise it become possible here, if we have always known that terra nullius was a fiction (and we now know that it was a legal instrument without precedent in international law)? There was never a vacant land. But, as Ford and Clemens write, these impediments (logical, empirical, legal, ethical) did in no way impede the rise of terra nullius, which swiftly formed the basis for how all future laws were to be written. The idea that this was no one’s land became the determining instrument and the constitutive authority upon which all subsequent legislation would be based. What the continuity rests on is a kind of authority we don’t understand very well. It was not the autocratic, economic authority of the penal colony, nor was it the traditional nor legal authority of the Crown. This was the authority of poetry, the property-raising ‘transformed silence,’ as Ford and Clemens describe it, working in ‘its performativity, retrospectivity, nostrocentric settlerism and progressive utopianism’ (36).
[Poetry’s ‘object’ was to be] truth, not individual and local, but general and operative; not standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion; truth which is its own testimony, which gives strength and divinity to the tribunal to which it appeals, and receives them from the same tribunal. ⑭ William Wordsworth, ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’, in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth: Volume 1, ed. W.J.B. Owen and J.W. Smyser (Clarendon Press, 1974), 163; cited in Ford and Clemens, Barron Field in New South Wales, 90.
Poetry and law were no longer connected in the geographical Western sense that had become customary, but brought together in new ways, precisely by their strange splitting, at once utterly internalised and utterly global, rhetorically strung out between the colonial town and the proper city of the home country. It was the Romantic Idea of the individual poet, the body in the landscape versifying his singular vision, that placed poetry in the highest authority, generalisable to all and answerable to no external authority. Or, as Ford and Clemens do it, in their outstanding foregrounding of Field’s autopoeisis:
The truths of poetry, for Wordsworth, involve a looping of legal statements so that they become autopoietic, which is to say: self-grounding and self-generative. In other words: poetry writes the laws it follows, which is how it tells properly self-evident truths … Wordsworth’s doctrine had been carried alive into his heard by passion, and he practices a version of it in ‘Botany-Bay Flowers.’ (91)
In their stunning reading of ‘Botany-Bay Flowers,’ the authors drive us to the heart of Field’s poem, Queen Mab’s dominion (the Shakespeare-stanning Field leans heavily here on A Midsummer Night’s Dream.)
But I incline to the opinion
That we are now in her dominion;
And we dream those self-same dreams,
Which (from Mercutio) it seems
We owe to Mab’s deliv’rancy,
As midwife and queen faery (ll.91-98)
Placed thus, Australia is always already part of ‘poetic England’—we dream those self-same dreams:
And this proof that Australia is English, because it was dreamt of in England’s dreaming, is presented poetically as a truth that need not stand upon any external testimony. For the fact that this truth is revealed in a dream, rather than controverting its legitimacy, instead confirms it. (96)
I truly mean the following statements: this is an awesome book; and yet, I probably still don’t understand the authors’ fullest implications of how Australia began, with law and poetry in step under the punning poetic feet of Field. This is not humility topos (though it may be sleep-deprived topos), nor is it a comment about the prose here, which on every page courageously commits to the reader’s comprehension of Field’s profound legacy of dispossession. As well as a powerful examination of the intersection of law and poetry in the workings of settlement, the book is also extremely funny, with the stylistic yielding to the collaborators’ inner poeticisms—see for instance the description of imperial Romantic sociability as a ‘far-flung homosocial community of moralising male middle managers’—as charming as they are convincing.
The book leaves me with a valuable new way to think about the contradictions of settlement—the ‘yeah, nah,’ the having it both ways, the paving of the path to Federation—that have long puzzled me. Along with the squatters’ dismissal of Bourke’s Proclamation as they claimed land whose unexploited resources they felt entitled to, other examples of Australian culture attempting to have it both ways includes the settler historical attitude to the past (as in, yeah, our present is continuous with the Gallipoli legend; but nah, we had nothing to do with the Stolen Generations, all that was ages ago). As Ford and Clemens write, the 1819 question ‘conquest or settlement?’ was legally resolved by Field’s answer, ‘settlement.’ But the juncture of law and poetry, ‘[c]onsidered semiotically, as a distinction drawn between indiscernibles, and as an identity effected within an apparent opposition … has the structure of the colonial pun’ (86). This pun produced and accounted for the real and enacted answer: ‘both.’
3. SFINDILIS AGAIN
Why did I begin this way? What were the continuities between that coffee I’d been walking for, dodging the property-heads along the way, feeling my bad mood redirect itself outward to the apparent priorities of the nation: getting jacked on the global affect (hustle, psychic conformity) and getting out of the way of property concerns (concrete, literally concrete, poured slowly, inexorably wrongly, and poured again). Small and big business confluent in one tight intersection. In a beautiful literalisation of whatever the metaphor for the collocation of rhetoric and property was about to be, my path was crossed by a local man I have been obsessed with for the past six months. Sfindilis, let’s call him (for that is his name): Agent of the Year at the nearby branch of Barry Plant, where he wears an always-recent haircut, a too-tight blue suit and pointy leather loafers his Zippo lighter and his takeaway cup of coffee always on hand. The point of Sfindilis, and the point of the colonial culture we share with him, it strikes me the moment I see him flip his Zippo, is absolutely economic. Later, it strikes me that the point of the culture is also absolutely poetic. Personhood is understood by the prospect of financial improvement; it is also understood by the prospect of cultural improvement: cultivation. Hence the haircut, the shoes, and the words, words, words. I like that I saw Sfindilis at this moment, his buoyancy reminding me that some of his time is spent writing, like his anti-peer in yours truly. Specifically, we happen to produce strange stabs of prose, both of us leaning heavily on repetitions, hyperbolic parataxis, wild modes of address. Let’s call these things prose poems, and let’s call the Agent of the Year the people’s poet. No other form of poetry is more familiar to the Australian reading audience, more widely read and better understood, not only for what is said but importantly for what is not said, than the 150-200 word copy that flogs real estate:
Life’s a joyful breeze with this easy-care, modern apartment promising the ultimate lifestyle defined by integrated living, contemporary finishes, quality inclusions and a vibrant, inner suburban postcode. The perfect set up for first home buyers and investors looking to secure comfort and convenience in a vibrant pocket. The complex also provides access to a rooftop with barbecue facilities, garden and outstanding views.
Comprising open plan living, a stylish kitchen boasting a Hafele oven and dishwasher, 2 bedrooms with mirrored built-in robes, a floor to ceiling tiled, designer bathroom and 2 toilets, a sophisticated powder room and smart euro laundry. Prioritising the outdoors, the floor plan allows for 2 balconies plus a terrace courtyard, efficiently extending the apartment's overall living space. Featuring a Daikin inverter, storage cage and car space.
Centrally positioned just 6kms from the CBD with Sydney Road delights at your door and within walking proximity to trams, Anstey Station, Clifton Park and Lygon Street shops, cafes and bars. Situated near quality schools, Barkly Square, CERES and Merri Creek Trail.
The repetition of ‘vibrant’ lends the piece a notable internal rhythm; there is also a nod to poetic precedent in the reference to ‘open plan living’, to proximity to cafes. It is a poem because it studiously instaures every prior advertisement for an open plan apartment as poetry. It is a poem; not a good poem, but good poetry is not the subject of this piece of writing. ‘Imagine,’ I ask you, what he’d write if he were selling ‘vacant land’: sky’s the limit, let your imagination run wild. That the apartment advertised here happens to be close to the location where Batman ‘negotiated’ the land sale with representatives of the Kulin people, somewhere around present-day Northcote along the Merri Creek Trail doesn’t make it into the Sfindilis poem despite the glowing report that the property ‘prioritis[es] the outdoors.’ Why would it include that history, and, more importantly, why does this non-continuity with the past completely not surprise: why would anyone remark on what is no less than the business as usual here, the business of forgetting. Business as usual, where the resident reader is always the apostrophic and optimal You of the Future. Chris Healy might describe the banality of this non-continuity within the national structure of forgetting (Aboriginal people). ⑮ Chris Healy, Forgetting Aborigines (UNSW Press, 2008). Ford and Clemens hold this in the structure of the bad colonial pun. In property poetry, the You of the Future needn't be concerned with any of that. I want to add to this my long-held suspicion that settler colonies’ evident obsession with home renovation expresses a deeply held anxiety around owning; we seem to be a country preoccupied by the question, are we owners? To paraphrase Anacreon (another literary source enjoyed by Field), we own and we own not. Would more labour prove ownership? Our interminable mixing of labour with property (quite literally, DIY every weekend under the surveillance of Bunnings) feels indicative of a certain truth: we are never sure about the basis for the home of our dreams.
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Works Cited
✷ Allon, Fiona. Renovation Nation: Our Obsession with Home. University of New South Wales Press, 2008.
✷ Borch, Merete. ‘Rethinking the Origins of Terra Nullius’. Australian Historical Studies 32, no. 117 (2001): 229–39.
✷ Bourke, Sir Richard. ‘Proclamation of Governor Bourke, 10 October 1835’. Colonial Office of the British Government, National Archives of the United Kingdom. Viewable at Museum of Australian Democracy.
✷ Clark, Ian D. ‘Scars in the Landscape: A Register of Massacre Sites in Western Victoria, 1803-1859’. In Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Report Series. Aboriginal Studies Press for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 1995.
✷ Dolin, Kieran. A Critical Introduction to Law and Literature. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
✷ Ford, Thomas H., and Justin Clemens. Barron Field in New South Wales: The Poetics of Terra Nullius. Melbourne University Press, 2023.
✷ Goldie, Terrie. Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian and New Zealand Literature. McGill-Queens University Press, 1989.
✷ Healy, Chris. Forgetting Aborigines. UNSW Press, 2008.
✷ Jordan, Robert. The Convict Theatres of Early Australia. University of Hertfordshire Press, 2003.
✷ McClintock, Alex. ‘Overseas Australian Cafes Are Selling an Empty Fantasy, but It’s Nice to Get a Decent Flat White’. The Guardian, 18 November 2019.
✷ McLean, Ian. White Aborigines: Identity Politics in Australian Art. Cambridge University Press, 1998.
✷ Mullaney, Julie. ‘New Labours, Older Nativisms? Australian Critical Whiteness Studies, Indigeneity and David Malouf’s Harland’s Half Acre’. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 42, no. 1 (2007): 97–116.
✷ Poelina, Anne, Stephen Muecke and Sandy Toussaint. ‘A Martuwarra Serpent Stirs in Its Sleep … Enduring Creation Stories in a Time of Crisis’. Griffith Review, no. 80 (2023): 36–43.
✷ Ripley, Amy. ‘John Olsen: The Last of Australia’s Great Generation of Artists’. Sydney Morning Herald, 11 April 2023.
✷ Roe, John Septimus. ‘Plan of the Town and Suburbs of Sydney 1822’, cartographic material, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney.
✷ Van, Lucy, and Anne Maxwell. ‘Camera, Colony, Künstlerroman: Photography in Three Australian Novels’. Journal of Australian Studies 42, no. 1 (2017): 116–130.
✷ Wordsworth, William. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth: Volume 1, edited by W.J.B. Owen and J.W. Smyser. Clarendon Press, 1974.
Lucy Van writes poetry and essays. Her poetry has appeared in publications including Debris, Cordite Poetry Review, Australian Poetry Journal, The Suburban Review, Rabbit, Axon and Best of Australian Poems. Her first poetry collection, The Open, was longlisted for the Stella prize, shortlisted for the Mary Gilmore award, and highly commended in the Anne Elder award. Read our interview about The Open here.