Barron Field's reputation as "the first Austral harmonist" rests tenuously upon a single volume, which in its first edition included only two pieces of moderate length, though insubstantial quality. The stated aims of the volume, grounded as they are in the need for Field to inaugurate what he saw as metropolitan literary discourse in the colony, are only occasionally glimpsed. What is significant about Field's Australian verse is that it demonstrates some of the highly problematic forces at work in European colonial representations of Australia. Although twentieth-century criticisms of First Fruits of Australian Poetry (1819) have focused on the formal banality of the volume, Field's verse rehearses and sketches some of the conflicts in imagining Australia that were to dominate white writing in the nineteenth century and have their echoes in the twentieth. The ambitious project Field had set for himself, namely to articulate a landscape where "nature reflecting art is not yet born," was guided by his background in the British Romantic movement.
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