Trojans in the Antipodes: The Fabrication of Epic Ancestry and Imperial Destiny in Colonial Australian Literature

Abstract

When Europeans settled on the Australian continent, Britain’s connections to the Greco-Roman classical tradition were being actively promoted as an inherent component of the empire’s cultural heritage. Since the foundation of the Australian colony of New South Wales, comparisons between the British dominion and classical antiquity were made in the hope that one day soon the history and literature of the new settlement would rival that of their cultural ancestors. Colonial Australian literature often focussed on the great potential the young civilization might enjoy. Because the geographical distance between Australia and Europe was so vast, connections to European cultural heritage were often laboriously constructed. This article focusses on the work of Michael Massey Robinson, a freed convict employed to write poetry by the New South Wales Governor, Lachlan Macquarie, from 1810. Drawing on the British legend of Brutus of Troy, recorded by the twelfth-century cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Regum Britanniae, Robinson casts the British decedents of Aeneas as the founders of the Australian continent, and ancestors of the Trojan people. By emphasizing Australia’s connections to the ancient world through ancestral lineage, the great potential of the young civilization could be celebrated, and by linking Australia’s European settlement to the foundation of both Rome and Britain, colonial Australia was characterized as being at the beginning of a very long history that, based on historical precedent, would eventually result in a great and esteemed empire.

The classical tradition was being drawn upon in Europe to imagine the Australian continent even before British settlement.¹ As Captain Lieutenant Watkin Tench journeyed from the Cape of Good Hope to Botany Bay he wrote: ‘The wind was now fair, the sky serene … Joy sparkled in every countenance … Ithaca itself was scarcely more longed for by Ulysses than Botany Bay by the adventurers who had traversed so many thousand miles to take possession of it’.² Tench sets up a comparison between the Europeans with whom he was travelling, and Odysseus and his men travelling home after the Trojan War. Tench’s recognition of his shared experience with Odysseus, both journeying to longed for destinations, reveals his cultural identification with the classical tradition and how the classics were drawn upon to frame the experience of a great adventure with auspicious anticipation. Drawing on ancient Greek or Roman history, literature and mythology to articulate individual experiences and mould what settlers could see into recognizable archetypes was not uncommon in the Australian colonies. Classical references are evident in the earliest poetry about European settlement and the classical tradition was also being drawn upon in artistic representations of New South Wales, the first Australian colony, and its inhabitants.³ A common theme when drawing on the classics was the promotion of a great destiny for the infant colony. The prophetic poem, ‘Visit of Hope to Sydney-Cove, near Botany-Bay’ (1789) written by Erasmus Darwin, envisions the great future of the colony while still in its infancy.⁴ Similarly, the Sydney Cove medallion (1789), fashioned by Joseph Wedgewood from clay collected from Sydney Cove, depicts the aspirations for the colony through the illustration of the allegorical figure of Hope greeting Peace, Art and Labour. Darwin’s poem and Wedgewood’s medallion are among the earliest examples of the classical tradition being used in colonial Australia. Drawing on the past provided European settlers with familiar cultural symbols, narratives and styles that could be employed to make sense of something very unfamiliar: the colony of New South Wales. They were comforting reminders of the colonizers’ cultural heritage that promoted the idea that the new antipodean settlement had European roots, as well as the potential for greatness even though the future would have appeared overwhelming and uncertain at the time.

When Europeans settled on the Australian continent, resources were scarce and education could not take precedence over the survival of the fledgling colony, so the governor did not allocate otherwise useful women and men to teaching or building schoolhouses.⁵ However, it is significant that of the books aboard the vessels of the First Fleet a large proportion had classically inspired themes.⁶ This meant that classical texts were in circulation in the colony from its infancy, although it is not possible to reconstruct how knowledge of antiquity was transmitted between the earliest European settlers in New South Wales. What is possible to trace is the writing of those who brought their classical education with them from Europe and drew upon it when writing about Australia. The popularity of the Greco-Roman classical tradition at this time meant that attempts to connect antiquity with Britain’s cultural heritage was being actively undertaken.⁷ In New South Wales, comparisons were predominately employed to express the hope that the future of the settlement might one day rival those from the ancient past.⁸ Comparisons between Australia and classical antiquity were made in the hope that in the future, the history and literature of New South Wales could enter the European canon.⁹ Colonial Australian literature often focussed on the potential of the young civilization, but because of the great geographical distance between Australia and Europe, these connections were often laboriously constructed through British ancestry, and invocations of classical literary or iconographic tropes. Australia was not officially established as a nation until the Commonwealth was inaugurated as part of the Federation of Australia on 1 January 1901. The name ‘Australia’ did, however, exist prior to the nation itself. The idea of ‘Australia’ was a European invention and any collective Australian identity during the early colonial period was a product of European imagination of the continent rather than an emerging ‘national’ identity.¹⁰ Without a nation any sense of nationalism was imagined. John Eddy and Deryck Schreuder argue that prior to federation, Australians exhibited ‘colonial nationalism’.¹¹ This was a sense of cultural identity that comprised aspects of an ever-changing series of connections to the British empire and a ‘living and enduring connection to [Australians’] European beginnings’.¹²

In the early colonial years, it was broadly believed that the Australian continent was an empty land, devoid of history, culture and civilization. Of course, this was not the case at all.¹³ Indigenous cultures had thrived on the continent for at least 50,000 years and in 1788 there were between 750,000 and 800,000 Aboriginal people living on the Australian continent.¹⁴ Len Smith has estimated that an approximate total of 2.5 billion Aboriginal people would have lived on the Australian continent before 1788.¹⁵ These people formed approximately 250 language groups and 500 nations/clans, so the notion that the Australian continent was devoid of culture is completely unfounded despite being broadly accepted by Europeans at the time.¹⁶ Despite the existence of robust Australian heritage, faced with the burden of having no recognizably European history, those who first settled in Australia from Europe set about the task of constructing their own. Allusions to the classics in Australian colonial literature leveraged tradition to assert a sense of cultural authority where it was difficult to see recognizable signs of European culture. Colonial Australia was not unique, drawing on ancient Greek and Roman classical traditions for inspiration, Britain and the United States were also drawing connections to the classical past to articulate aspects of their cultural heritage. In the United States, symbols of the Roman Republic dominated early national symbols and ideals. Sir Thomas Jefferson modelled official state buildings on Roman exemplars and sites of governmental significance were named for Roman precedents, including the ‘Capitol’ in Washington which was named for the Capitoline Hill in Rome.¹⁷ Nineteenth-century English literature idealized the classical past as a remedy to industrialization; creating beauty to offset the rise of materialism, and to critique the perception that civilization had become corrupted by movement away from nature and agricultural endeavour.¹⁸ The industrialization of England, Britain and Europe at the time represented a changing relationship between humans, animals and the natural world.¹⁹ It was suddenly possible for humans to control and transform nature in ways that were not previously possible. Urbanization disconnected people from the natural world and large-scale migration over long distances further disconnected people from the familiar. As an antidote to this disconnection, connections to idealized pasts became common. Highet describes the tendency to romanticize the classical past as part of a newly developing sense of history and legend that connected the present to the past.²⁰ This search for meaning, understanding and heritage was particularly necessary in contexts where people were significantly removed from their homes and societies. Idealized utopias were imagined by those who wrote about the Australian colonies, despite the harsh realities that surrounded them, in order to make sense of their new circumstances in familiar ways.²¹

Michael Massey Robinson and the Colony of New South Wales

This article examines the fabrication of antipodean classical ancestry in colonial Australian literature and its tendency to position the young colony as an embryonic empire with epic classical pedigree. It focusses on the work of Michael Massey Robinson (1744–1826), the freed convict poet, Oxford graduate and former lawyer who wrote odes for the King at the behest of Governor Lachlan Macquarie.²² Robinson’s poetic works, published between 1810 and 1826, represent the first state-funded body of work produced in Australia that draws consistently and significantly on the classical tradition. These poems were written in the hope that future generations of Australians would look back to them as the great origin myths of their burgeoning empire and are therefore critical to understanding the role of the classical tradition in the cultural formation and understanding of colonial Australia.

Robinson was transported to Australia in 1798 after being convicted of blackmail. Upon arrival in New South Wales, he was quickly put to work in the colony’s legal offices. Robinson was granted a conditional pardon in 1800 but abused his position and was reconvicted in 1802, this time for corruption and perjury. He was sent to Norfolk Island as punishment, returning in 1806, and married Elizabeth Rowley sometime thereafter, having three children together. It was not until April 1810, when Governor Lachlan Macquarie appointed him chief clerk in his Secretary’s Office, that Robinson started publishing poetry. Robinson retained his position during Macquarie’s 11-year tenure, writing odes to celebrate King George III and Queen Charlotte’s birthdays.²³ By 1816, Robinson had been dubbed ‘The Laureate Bard’ of New South Wales.²⁴ He continued his service with the government being promoted to the Office of the Deputy-Provost-Marshall in 1819, and to principal clerk in the Police Department in May 1821. While still employed by the government, Robinson died in 1826, when he was approximately 72 years old.²⁵

Robinson’s odes draw on the British legend of Brutus of Troy presented by the 12th-century cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Regum Britanniae, casting the British as decedents of Aeneas and, therefore, the founders of the Australian continent as ancestors to the Trojan people.²⁶ Robinson drew on Monmouth, and by extension Virgil, to characterize European settlers in Australia as heirs to the Trojan people with an imperial destiny that rivalled that of the ancient Romans and the contemporary British Empire. Robinson was not suggesting that New South Wales had yet become a great empire in his poems, but by linking Australia’s European settlement to the foundation of the Roman people, and the Roman and British Empires, he characterizes colonial Australia as being at the beginning of a very long history that, based on historical precedent, would eventually result in a great and esteemed empire. Rather than draw on anything local, Robinson enlisted ancient Greek, Roman and early British cultural narratives to construct European heritage for colonial Australia. Turning to the past for inspiration allowed Robinson to ignore the harsh and unpleasant realities that surrounded him.

The colony of New South Wales was predominately populated with convicts and military personnel in the first decades of its existence. In 1800, the non-indigenous population of New South Wales was 5,217. By 1818, it had grown to more than 20,000. In 1830, there were 15,700 free migrants in Australia.²⁷ New South Wales was a penal colony, populated, among free settlers, by those transported to Australia as punishment for committing a crime in Britain. Between 1788 and 1842, approximately 80,000 convicts were sent to New South Wales.²⁸ Almost two-thirds of these were English and approximately one-third were Irish. There were also some Scottish and Welsh prisoners sentenced to transportation. The 15% female and 85% male convict population were normally sentenced for terms of 7 or 14 years. It was also possible to be sentenced for the term of one’s natural life, although this was less common. The behaviour of convicts varied. A system of graded labour, assigning the most problematic prisoners to the harshest conditions, and the least problematic to the lightest and most pleasant duties, indicates not all convicts behaved like hardened criminals.²⁹ Those who committed additional offences could be sent further away to Norfolk Island and, later, Van Diemen’s Land (modern day Tasmania). Often more problematic were the seamen, who were frequently written about as behaving significantly worse than the convicts.³⁰ Lieutenant Ralph Clark, who sailed on the Friendship as part of the First Fleet, wrote in his personal diary that the seamen were ‘ten thousand times worse than the convicts’.³¹ The very earliest reports from the colony indicate that even the free settlers who travelled to the Australian continent did not inspire visions of a grand future. In correspondence from Governor Hunter to the King’s undersecretary on 30 April 1796, Hunter calls for settlers of higher quality. He refers to those already in New South Wales as having ‘truly worthless characters’, very few of whom being ‘likely to benefit the settlement’.³² Two years later, Hunter describes those who had settled in the colony as ‘wicked, aband’d and irreligious’, unlike any other group who had previously ‘been brought together in any part of the wo’ld’.³³ There was, however, hope that future generations would overcome the misfortunes of their parents and prosper. Looking to the future, the convict turned chief police constable and author, George Barrington, expressed his fond hope that the 1,000 young people who had been born in New South Wales by 1802 would ‘become good and useful members of society’.³⁴

The tendency for early colonial literature to look back to Europe for inspiration not only ignores the reality of the colonial conditions, but it also ignores the First Nations population in New South Wales. In the colony’s seat of government, Sydney, these were the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. First Nations people perplexed British colonists, who attempted to understand them in European terms. Although described as ‘courageous’ and ‘cunning’,³⁵ they were mostly understood to be ‘ignorant’, ‘unenlightened savages’.³⁶ Some colonizers believed that enlightenment would lead to Aboriginal people eventually possessing the ‘refined qualifications’ of Europeans, but at the turn of the 19th-century First Nations people were generally considered to be just as wretched, if not more so, than the ‘depraved’ convicts and undesirable free settlers.³⁷

To distract from the unpleasant reality of life in the colony, as early as 1789, Australia was being characterized as an infant Rome enjoying a rural Golden Age.³⁸ The Roman empire served as a useful cultural precedent for authors because Roman culture was rich, revered, well understood, and could be reconstructed through the agency of local élite; in this case, Robinson.³⁹ Drawing on the classical tradition added an element of distinction to Australian narratives because of the general high regard in which classical literature was held at the time. As Barbara Goff argues, ‘because Classics bear with it the weight of tradition and authority, it can easily be pressed into service as a sign of tradition and authority in general’; an intellectual currency.⁴⁰ Goff argues that the classics are drawn into new contexts and shaped to suit new purposes as well as a form of ‘cultural arrogance’ exerted by Europeans in colonial contexts.⁴¹ Robinson and other Australian writers at the time employed Rome as a sign of tradition and authority, but also to construct something new; a recognizable Australian identity built on the solid foundations of their cultural ancestors that was also uniquely antipodean in nature; a new people in a new world connected to an old people from an old world.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Greek and Roman classics were well understood by the educated classes in Britain, Europe and their colonies. Even the less educated would have been familiar with aspects of classical myth, literature, art and architecture through the pervasive influence of neo-classicism and the prevalence of works in translation.⁴² In the early 19th century ‘cheap mass circulation general interest periodicals’ flourished in England.⁴³ These were comprised of contemporary and classic literature, including that from ancient Greece and Rome (in translation). Although access to classical texts would have been unsystematic and incomplete compared to those who were formally educated, access to periodicals would have resulted in some general historical and literary knowledge among the non-elite classes. In 1916, W.B. Yeats wrote about the need to possess a rich memory to understand poetry because the use and reuse of rhythm and vocabulary echoed through the genre.⁴⁴ The reemployment of a familiar cadence, phrase or subject brings an earlier poem to life in the new. However, revivifying the old requires knowledge of the original to understand echoes from the past and their reinterpretation in the later work. Robinson’s poetry drew on ancient poetic styles and themes that echo past works in the same way that Virgil’s Aeneid, for example, was written to echo Homer’s earlier epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. The widely understood ‘authority’, ‘language’ and ‘memory’ of ancient literature was utilized by Robinson to define the new civilization by situating it within a European tradition dating back to antiquity and, as a result, classical allusions permeate Australian national symbols even before it was a nation.⁴⁵ Robinson utilized traditional and well-understood notions of epic heroism and the mythical foundation of empires to craft a narrative about Australia’s great destiny. Central to this narrative was the progress of civilization driven by the political actors of the time and the contextualization of Australia’s establishment into the greater narrative of the progress of European civilization from antiquity to the current day.

The epic genre is suited to prophetic narratives because it trades in the unique destinies of local cultures.⁴⁶ By employing epic tropes and emphasizing Australia’s connections to the ancient world through ancestral lineage, Robinson’s poetry presents the great potential of the young civilization, projecting a great Australian destiny in heroic and imperial terms. Robinson’s European settlers, like Aeneas when he stepped upon Italian shores, were at the end of their long sea journey to new but destined homelands. As they worked to cultivate this destined homeland, the European settlers would also be cultivating a great antipodean civilization that could extend as far into the future as the story of Aeneas stretched back into the past.

Fabricating Epic Ancestry

In his series of odes, written while employed by Macquarie and the colonial government, Robinson characterizes British settlers on the Australian continent as explorers who undertook an epic journey. In order to establish an antipodean–Trojan connection, Robinson draws on Monmouth’s British foundation myth because it connects Trojans and Britons through shared ancestry. Specifically, Monmouth’s characterization of Brutus, the great grandson of Aeneas, as the first King of Britain.⁴⁷ According to Monmouth, Brutus, after accidentally killing his father Silvius (the son of Ascanius), was exiled from Italy and forced to travel through Europe and the Mediterranean until he received a vision from Diana that revealed his royal destiny.⁴⁸ With this knowledge, Brutus sailed to Albion and renamed it Britain after himself.⁴⁹ Brutus settled on the Thames and named his city Troia Nova. The city name changed over the years to Trinovantum (coincidentally, the Trinovantes were a local people in Iron Age Britain). Eventually, the city was rebuilt by King Lud who named it Caer Lud, this in turn corrupted and became Kaer Llundain, then Londonium, and, finally, London.⁵⁰

Monmouth’s legend served to incorporate British settlement into the Greco-Roman literary tradition,⁵¹ and was written as the fourth instalment in the narrative that started with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and continued in Vergil’s Aeneid. This invented narrative casts Britain as a Trojan colony and the British people as direct descendants of the Trojans. Following this logic, Robinson’s extension of the journey narrative to Australia adds a fifth installment to the series; Cook’s departure from London and landing on the Australian continent was a continuation of Brutus’ journey, and Aeneas’ before him. If Britain was founded by a descendant of Aeneas, and Australia was founded by a descendant of Brutus, then the Australian people would be able to claim Trojan ancestry. In the context of Monmouth’s history and, by extension the Aeneid, the British people are descended from the noble line of Trojan royalty, and, consequently, the Australian people can also claim Trojan ancestry. Robinson’s poetry extends the ancestry of the Australian people back to the Trojans through Cook, Brutus and Aeneas, casting those now on Australian soil as having ancestors who originated in Troy, where, at the end of the Trojan War, Aeneas led survivors across the seas to a new home in Italy. Building on Monmouth’s British origin myth, Robinson’s antipodean settlers are the latest in a great line of epic voyagers destined to found a new empire.

Empires were not built overnight, so having established a noble lineage and a grand destiny for those who settled in Australia, Robinson could turn some of his literary attention to projecting Australia’s great imperial destiny in epic terms. The Aeneid provides a useful foundation for epic narratives that have historical and national themes, and it was common for local epics to establish lineage that cast Troy as their place of origin.⁵² Central to these was the migration of empires from east to west, from Troy to contemporary Europe. Virgil’s integration of history and literature elevates Rome’s origins, presenting challenges as something that could one day result in a great empire, and offering prophetic insight into the destiny of the collective represented in the poem. Robinson’s poems, similarly, intertwine history and mythology to project a grand destiny arising from literary precedent. Although he does not employ the epic style, Robinson makes clear references to Virgil’s epic throughout his odes. The first lines of Robinson’s ‘Ode for His Majesty’s Birth-Day, 1814’ allude to the opening lines of the Aeneid:

Of War, and Warlike Chieftans glorious,

Of Conflicts brave, and Arms victorious,

Of Legions on the tented Plain,

And Feats that aw’d the subject Main,

The MUSES, from an early Age,

Have form’d the Theme for Classic Page.⁵³

This song of arms, war and a great man sung by the Muses is set up by Robinson as the classical exemplar. Virgil’s opening line, ‘Arms, and the man I sing’ (Arma virumque cano), is perceptible, although not quoted verbatim.⁵⁴ Robinson’s allusion to the epic is enough for his purpose of setting up an expectation that the narrative in his poem is like the one that follows the journey of Aeneas, and owes a debt to the mythical tradition. Robinson has more ancestral territory to cover, and more associations to draw between his Australians and the best of their cultural heritage, so does not dwell on precise imitation. The remainder of Robinson’s poem goes on to tell of the other great things about which the Muses have sung, and follows their songs through ‘sylvan Bow’rs’ from ‘Songs of War’, and ‘Notes of Love’ to the arrival of ‘polish’d Lyres’ on ‘ALBION’S Shore’. Robinson then lauds Milton and Shakespeare as ‘sublime’ and ‘magic’ before declaring that ‘ALBION’S Bards, like her own Warriors, long/Fame shall immortalize in lasting Song!’ The following stanza invokes the Muse to hail the present King on his birthday, implying that Robinson is the latest in the long line of great bards he has just exalted. The prophetic nature of his poetry establishes a great future for the Australian people and Robinson is making it clear that he hopes his poems will later become part of the literary canon because of the important narrative they tell. Adapting epic themes allowed the poet to foster a sense of cultural continuity. The epic genre projects forward to a Golden Age but does not focus on an end point. Rather, the narrative is ongoing, it looks backwards and forwards to position the present in a continuum. Using the epic genre is a way of endorsing the subject matter presented, leveraging epic precedent to ensure contemporary clout. Robinson, then, presents Australia at the beginning of their journey towards a great empire in the image of those preceding it.

Robinson’s presentation of a future Australian empire drew on earlier examples. Captain Arthur Phillip, the first Governor of New South Wales, wrote in his account of the foundation of the colony that ‘[f]rom smaller, and not more respectable beginnings, powerful empires have frequently arisen’.⁵⁵ His words imply great things would come from New South Wales, in time. The idea that from nothing a great empire would prosper persisted into the nineteenth century. The 1879 Sydney University Prize Poem ‘Captain Cook Meditating on Australia’s Future’ presents Captain Cook waking a sleeping continent when he claimed terra Australis for the British Empire in 1770.⁵⁶ This poem presents Cook contemplating ‘sleeping nature; and the quiet bay/Calmly reposing, as in tranquil sleep’. He does so while standing on the deck of his ‘noble ship that in the peaceful bay’, where ‘her wand’rings found a happy close’. As he gazes upon the peaceful landscape he imagines it being cleared of vegetation and towns being erected. Time passes quickly and Cook witnesses the settlement’s transition from structures of ‘humble roof’ to those with ‘dome and tower’. Later Cook can see ‘Poets with souls of fire … sing prophetic!’ filling college halls as he imagines the emerging civilization he beholds to be ‘Forever glorious, and for ever [sic] free!’ The poem presents an empty landscape that needs to be populated with recognizable markers of culture and civilization, as well as the need for poets to write stories that prophesize the great future of Australia. These stories needed to hold meaning for the European settlers who wrote them and would read them, and constructed, not dissimilarly to the way that towns and cities needed to be constructed, so that they reflected the values and aspirations of the society they served.

‘Captain Cook Meditating on Australia’s Future’ owes a debt to Robinson’s presentation of Cook arriving on Australian shores. Robinson too presented the Australian continent encountered by Cook as lacking culture and cultivation in an early poem, ‘Ode for the King’s Birth-Day, 1811’. He describes a lack of recognizable monuments and other familiar marks of civilization: ‘Time was, when o’er this dread. Expanse of land/No trait appear’d of Culture’s fost’ring hand’.⁵⁷ Robinson’s poems, which repeat the same imagery and narrative throughout (often verbatim), represent Cook as being responsible for liberating the Australian continent from nothingness⁵⁸:

His [the King] fost’ring Smile bade gallant Cook explore

The frowning Cliffs that guard Australia’s Shore;

And rescue from Obscurity’s cold Hand

The native Promise of her genial Land.⁵⁹

Although the Australian continent had been settled for at least 50,000 years by indigenous Australians, the assertion that Europeans brought enlightenment, religion and civilization to the antipodes dominates Robinson’s poems and reflects contemporary understanding of the colonial project and the tendency to obfuscate Aboriginal Australians at the time. By declaring that the Australian continent was uninhabited the dispossession of Aboriginal inhabitants extended beyond land to their very personhood and humanity. Paul Collis and Jen Webb argue that ‘in Australia, the colonial moment was based on a fetishistic split: I know very well (that there are whole communities here), but just the same (I act as if they are not here)’ and that this ‘plunged Aboriginal people into invisibility’.⁶⁰ Although the British government was fully aware that the Australian continent was inhabited, there was no recognition of First Nation’s sovereignty or ownership, and the land was declared terra nullius.⁶¹ The colonial government set up the prospect of Australia being an empty landscape with no local narratives upon which to build, so Robinson, as the state poet needed to look elsewhere for stories he could draw upon and weave into an appropriately grand Australian origin myth.

Robinson sets up Cook’s arrival on Australian shores as the end to a long journey that started with the exile of the Trojan people. He includes any reference to the past in his poetry that could add gravity or prestige to the journey of those who would eventually settle in New South Wales so that the absence of physical markers of history at their destination could be ameliorated by the rich cultural heritage of those who settled what they perceived to be an empty land. In ‘Ode for the Queen’s Birthday, 1817’, Robinson refers to early Greece, Ilium, Athens, Albion and Australia in succession.⁶² His later 1821 poem, ‘Song for His Majesty’s Birth-Day’, similarly sets up a generational succession of culture, referring to Homer, Virgil, ancient Athens and Rome, Augustus, Shakespeare, Milton and Britain in just three stanzas:

WHILST Grecian Legends proudly claim

The triumph of their HOMER’S Name,

And MANTUA’s Bard, with fadeless Glory,

Crowns the bright Themes of classic Story,—

Surviving Genius fondly twines

Fresh Laurels round their hallow’d Shrines;

And, from the Page of early Lore,

Loves to retrace those Days of Yore,

When the young Arts, by Learning nourish’d,

Burst from their Germs–matur’d–and flourish’d;

And ATHENS, high, triumphant, and renown’d,

Saw her own Lustre gild the Nations round!

AND tho’ succeeding Times display’d,

The Havock barbarous Hoardes had made,

That swept with desolating Rage

The Boast of the AUGUSTAN Age;

And hid, in cold oblivious Gloom,

The letter’d Pride of fallen ROME!

Still GENIUS slumber’d in the Waste,

To rise with freshen’d Grace at last:—

To see proud Science her fair Morn restore.

And shed her brightest Ray on ALBION’s Shore!

Then SHAKESPEARE’S Muse, transcendent, hurl’d

Its Magic thro’ a wondering World;

Then MILTON’S bold aspiring Lyre

Glow’d with charm’d Fancy’s hallow’d Fire;

And after Ages own’d, with Taste refin’d,

The boundless Empire of the Human mind!⁶³

Robinson’s invocation of Australia’s cultural lineage throughout his poetry traces the journey of those who had settled in New South Wales from ancient Greece and Rome, via Britain, and towards a great antipodean future.⁶⁴ Evident in both examples provided, Australia is the last location to be listed in his poems because it is the final destination of those who represent the continuous Trojan–Roman–British–Australian culture Robinson constructs. This poem concludes with the presentation of Australia as a ‘favor’d isle’ awaiting its ‘impending fate’.⁶⁵ Robinson’s ‘infant land’ would grow up, just as those that came before and take on the mantle of the ‘world’s renown’. Despite these rather miscellaneous references to the past, there is a progression in this poem from Troy to Rome, and then from to Britain and Australia. In this ode, the British founder of Australia takes on the mantle of Aeneas and the future of the Australian race is compared with that of the Roman and the Trojan people. This is indicative of the chronological progression followed by each of Robinson’s odes, from distant past, through the development of Albion into an imperial power, on to Australia, which was a product of the great ancestors who brought about the young civilization, and finally to the descendants who would forge a great empire just as their predecessors had before them—this time on antipodean soil.

In order for an Australian empire to rise, the British would need to fall. Having British parentage and Roman and Trojan ancestry meant that any antipodean empire was likely to be as great as those preceding it. It made sense, then, to valorize these great fallen empires which had brought forth their Australian descendant. The progression of empires and their rise and fall is presented in an address delivered by a young Australian at the 50th anniversary of New South Wales’ colonization in 1838:

‘Rome, Carthage, Greece and Troy, all had their day

Of infant strength – of glory – and decay;

Their power, like Australia’s, first was small;

They rose in time – but rose, alas, to fall.

Such is the curse of change that ever clings

To mighty empires, and all earthly things.

Our land shall rise, like every other clime,

To martial glory, and to power sublime.

May it progress in honours, arts and fame,

And win, like Rome, an everlasting name!’⁶⁶

Australia is here presented as a future empire that would rise to greatness by following in the footsteps of the great imperial powers of Troy, Greece, Carthage and Rome. The implication that the British Empire, ruled by the subject of Robinson’s poems, would eventually fall might be interpreted as subversive. However, this was not their reception, likely because the poems present the current monarchs in a sufficiently flattering light and suppose the continuation of the British race through the rise of any Australian empire. The importance of Australia’s British imperial pedigree is recognized by Robinson: ‘by Britain rear’d, and foster’d’.⁶⁷ It was this parentage that would facilitate Australia one day achieving their own fame: ‘From her own Source her ample Produce pour,/Thro’ Eastern Climes, and every peopled Shore…/And her full Marts, her busy Quays, proclaim/Her pros’ring Course to Opulence and Fame’.⁶⁸ By presenting Australia as the latest in a long list of great imperial civilizations made famous in epic, Robinson encouraged his readers to imagine the destiny of the young colony in epic terms and cast the present monarchs as eventual mythic founders who would be remembered in annals of Australian history as well as the great empire’s origin mythologies.

The theme, that Britain (and therefore Australia) had inherited all the greatest achievements of the ancient world, including their culture, art, literature and ability to discover and build prosperous empires, was central to almost all Robinson’s poetry, and his constructed heritage for Australia served to connect the colonial experience to universal laws of progress in the appropriate language of poetry.⁶⁹ The arrival of the British on Australian shores is described in Robinson’s 1811 ‘Ode for the King’s Birth Day, 1811’:

But, when BRITANNIA’s Sons came forth, to brave

The dreary Perils of the length’ning Wave;

When her bold Barks, with swelling Sails unfurled,

Trace’d these rude Coasts, and hail’d a new-found World.

Soon as their Footsteps press’d the yielding sand,

A sun more genial brighten’d on the Land:

Commerce and Arts enrich’d the social Soil,

Burst through the gloom and bade all Nature smile!⁷⁰

Allusions to Dryden’s translation of the Aeneid resonate throughout this section of the poem, which draws on the language used to describe Aeneas’ arrival on Italian shores in Book 7.

The first line casts those who travelled to the Australian continent as ‘Britannia’s Sons’, echoing Dryden’s Aeneas: ‘A foreign son upon thy shore descends’.⁷¹ The journey by sea described in the third line of Robinson’s stanza again recalls Dryden’s translation of up Aeneas’ journey: ‘He plow’d the Tyrrhene seas with sails display’d’.⁷² Robinson’s reference to arts emerging through the gloom also have precedent in the Aeneid: ‘His race, in arms and arts of peace renown’d’; ‘the joyful train/Glide thro’ the gloomy shade, and leave the main’.⁷³ And, it is in Book 7 that the future children of Aeneas and Lavinia are prophesized to be the first of a new race that would come to possess ‘whate’er the sun surveys around’.⁷⁴ Aeneas makes landfall in Book 7, and he encounters the river and forest in lines 29–36. The memory of the Aeneid is evident in Robinson’s poem and his choice to reference this section of Book 7, which tells of Aeneas making landfall in Italy and of the great Roman future that would stem from that act, suggests a similarly glorious fate for the Australian people.

By employing language that reminded the reader of Aeneas’ arrival in Italy when describing Cook’s arrival on Australian shores, Robinson links the two events in the minds of the reader. Dryden’s vocabulary is employed by Robinson to connect the birth of the Roman Empire to British discovery of the Australian continent. The emphasis on maritime arrival further strengthens this connection. These oblique references to the Aeneid include the Latin poem in Australia’s cultural heritage and the origins of the great Roman Empire are likened to the early colonization of Australia. This then extended the ancient historical pattern of conquest and civilization into the new world and onto Australian shores.

Antipodean Arcadia

Unlike the epic narratives that Robinson draws upon, his poems present peaceful scenes and are not centrally concerned with war. This implies that British conquest was peaceful, however, in reality, there were wars occurring on the Australian continent throughout the colonial period. Colonists often described Aboriginal resistance to the invasion of their lands as ‘war’,⁷⁵ and frontier violence was so prevalent that dedicated native and mounted police forces were deployed against Aboriginal people, destroying their societies.⁷⁶ However, in his depiction of peaceful and idealized rural scenes, Robinson fancifully depicts a pastoral utopia that draws on themes explored in Virgil’s georgic poetic works. Georgic poetry (in translation) was popular at the time Robinson was writing his odes and, as in georgic poetry, and, as I have argued elsewhere, it was common in contemporary colonial literature for the Australian landscape to be populated by agricultural workers toiling for a simple but prosperous future.⁷⁷ Virgil’s georgic poetry emphasized the virtues of agricultural work. Dryden’s 1697 translation of Virgil’s Georgics, which would have been most familiar to Robinson, reoriented Virgil’s work to speak to imperial matters and promoted the idea that farmers cultivate the land, and in doing so they also cultivate civilization.⁷⁸ 18th and 19th century georgic, then, presented the construction of empires on the foundations of agricultural success, indicating that progress from nothing to greatness took a linear path predicated on hard work.⁷⁹ Georgic was strongly associated with empire and propagated ideas evident in Dryden’s translation that linked the labour undertaken by a farmer to imperial success, promoting the notion that the success and progress of an empire relied on the hard work of those undertaking agricultural cultivation.⁸⁰ Despite the idealized depictions of the Australian landscape in nineteenth century literature, it was completely unlike the British and European landscapes familiar to colonial settlers. It was harsh, and difficult to cultivate, making narratives about the importance of hard work and its connection to imperial prosperity even more important.⁸¹

Contemporary georgic poetry absorbed the old into the new as a means to engage with large-scale industrial and imperial changes from the 18th century.⁸² It presented human progress as linear, that from the most humble of origins empires could be born through toil, and that the grind associated with cultivating the land led to the cultivation of civilizations free from corruption.⁸³ According to Jennifer Baker, at the time, georgic poetry ‘sparked a revolutionary shift not only in the way the English were thinking about agrarian capitalism, but also in the ways they developed agricultural sciences, capitalist economics, and the control of nature in British imperial interests’.⁸⁴ Imperial georgic poetry is a reorientation of English georgic that came about not long after Dryden translated Virgil’s Georgics. Central to imperial georgic was the dependency of imperial expansion on ‘human technological mastery over nature’, it ‘emphasized a linear ideal of human progress from a terra nullius wilderness to civilization and cultural sophistication’.⁸⁵ This picked up the tendency in Dryden’s translation to characterize human progress in a linear teleological manner. Imperial georgic, therefore, represents the farmer as the agent of imperial progress, working for the expansion of empire cultivating civilization as well as the fields.⁸⁶ An example of his use of imperial georgic tropes to connect labour with imperial progress can be seen in Robinson’s ‘Ode For the Queen’s Birth-Day, 1813’:

Abundant Harvests cloathe the fruitful Vales.

O’er the green Upland see new Hamlets spread,

the Frugal Garden, and the ‘straw-built shed;’

The Cot, where Peace a smiling Aspect wears,

And the charm’d Husbandman forgets his Cares.

See, opening Towns with rival Skill display

The Structure hold–the Mart, and busy Quay:

Streets ably form’d by persevering Toil,

And Roads the Trav’ller’s wearied Course beguile:–⁸⁷

The words and ideas in this stanza are repeated throughout Robinson’s odes, which consistently represent the Australian landscape as peaceful and prosperous. Here, the romanticization of pastoral cultivation leads to the cultivation of virtue and the genesis of a prosperous future.⁸⁸

Australian georgic poetry draws on the Virgilian tradition to present the colonies experiencing a rural Golden Age that would precede the rise of an Australian empire.⁸⁹ There was a sense among writers in 19th-century New South Wales that they stood in the ‘same position in relation to the young New South Wales as Virgil had to a rising Rome’.⁹⁰ Depictions of the colony often characterized settlers as enjoying simple, rustic prosperity evident in Virgil’s Georgics, blissfully unaware of their good fortune.⁹¹ Australian georgic presented Golden Ages won through the peaceful cultivation of land which had not been corrupted by industrialization. This built on the classical trope of the locus amoenus; a remote, pleasant and rural place, removed from urban and harsh realities.⁹² There was a tendency to imagine Australia as a place of rural prosperity, where fortunes could be made through hard work on the land.⁹³ It was not unusual for Australia to be characterized as a utopia or Arcadia, and it was strongly associated with Etruria almost immediately after the British took command of the colony.⁹⁴ In August 1790, King George III endorsed the first seal of New South Wales, which depicted a neo-classical allegorical scene inspired by the Sydney Cove Medallion crafted by Joseph Wedgewood. This seal carried the motto sic fortis Etruria crevit (thus Etruria grew strong).⁹⁵ Imagining Australia as a place of rural prosperity was an antidote to the industrialization occurring in Britain at the time, which was often depicted in terms of the end of natural prosperity.⁹⁶ The understanding of New South Wales as an Arcadia persisted into the nineteenth century, and can be seen in Samuel Sidney’s very popular book The Three Colonies of Australia (1852).⁹⁷ Sidney describes the colony of New South Wales as:

a land of promise for the adventurous–a home of peace and independence for the industrious–an El Dorado and an Arcadia combined, where the hardest and the easiest, best-paid employments are to be found, where every striving man who rears a race of industrious children, may sit under the shadow of his own vine and fig-tree–not without work, but with little care–living on his own land, looking down to the valleys to his herds–towards the hills to his flocks, amid the humming of bees, which know no winter.⁹⁸

This presentation of Australian prosperity in an idealized bucolic landscape overlooks the difficulties experienced by European settlers, and actively contradicts the harsh realities of life in the bush.⁹⁹

Literature was filled with laments to the demise of nature and the rise of factories spewing out pollutants. In Australia, however, there were no factories or mills, and nature abounded. Recalling the continuous cycle of human adaptation to their environment and the hard work required to prosper despite the physical challenges of agricultural toil, Robinson constructed an ideal rural blank slate, which would be transformed over time into an empire through the labour of European settlers.¹⁰⁰ Although depicted as a rural ideal, the reality was that the application of modern agricultural techniques in a vastly different and unfamiliar landscape meant farmers were not masters of their environment, and this presented continual challenges to those attempting to cultivate it.¹⁰¹ Imperial georgic has a tendency to promote future prosperity that would come from farming rather than any difficulties associated with its realities,¹⁰² and Robinson presents the Australian landscape as ‘genial’ throughout his odes ignoring the hostility of the outback.¹⁰³ He prophesizes that ‘Australia’s annals’ would tell people in the future of the colony’s ‘peopled Towns and fruitful Vales,/Her Herds and Flocks that countless rove,/Her Pastures rich, and cluster’d Dales;/Her spacious Harbours girt with Sylvan Pride’.¹⁰⁴ The term ‘Sylvan’ here links the Australian landscape to the Roman god Sylvanus, who protected woods, fields and cattle, and augurs the agricultural prosperity that would fill Australian poems about this time, written far in the future. The idea that the first pages of a future Australian history would tell of a bountiful and welcoming landscape pervade Robinson’s poetry.¹⁰⁵ For example, in ‘Ode for the King’s Birth-Day, 1917’:

on thy hospitable Shores,

Shall Nature shed her bounteous Stores,

And Ages hence—the Page of Fame

Shall consecrate AUSTRALIA’S Name!

Robinson idealizes colonial agriculture as abundant, charming and peaceful throughout his odes.¹⁰⁶ This works as an antidote to the challenges presented by the Australian landscape, which, although far from a fecund pastoral utopia, was a largely uncultivated tabula rasa (at least from the colonizer’s perspective), and would require significant labour to transform into a recognizably European civilization. Robinson articulates this sentiment in his ‘Ode for the Queen’s Birth-Day, 1816’:

from the Birth of Time the slumbering Soil

Had bourne no Traces of the Peasant’s Toil—

Behold, where Industry’s encourag’d Hand

Has chang’d the lurid Aspect of the Land¹⁰⁷

Robinson’s Australia drew on the popular conception that the sleeping continent was awoken by European settlement. Robinson, like Virgil, presents a fantastic agrarian idyll which would be the origin of a future empire. Robinson’s empire would rival that of ancient Rome, built up from the same humble origins, and eventually surpass that of its British parent; the next generation in a long and revered imperial lineage.

August Colonial Leadership

Playing on the Roman destiny of the young Australian colony, the Roman emperor Augustus is featured prominently as an exemplar of leadership in Robinson’s poetry and the King is frequently likened to Rome’s first emperor Augustus. Charlotte, the Queen, is also referred to as ‘Augusta’s peerless Queen’.¹⁰⁸ Although Robinson’s odes are dedicated to the reigning monarchs and their connection to Augustus is explicit, the connection between the first Roman emperor and Robinson’s patron, Governor Lachlan Macquarie, are also evident. Macquarie was known to have drawn on an Augustan model of leadership.¹⁰⁹ When he arrived to govern New South Wales in 1810, he surrounded himself with artists, writers and others who could work to transform the colony. This and his admiration for the Greco-Roman past led to a ‘minor renaissance of neo-classical culture’ in the antipodean colony.¹¹⁰ Robinson, like other poets writing about Australia during Macquarie’s governorship, was prone to employ the trope of rising and falling empires.¹¹¹ In his ‘Ode for the King’s Birth-Day, 1811’ he characterizes Rome as the ‘proud Mistress of the World’, ‘rich in Arts, in Arms renown’d’, before describing her fall as a result of ‘LUXURY’S intemp’rate Trains/Spread[ing] Desolation o’er her Plains’.¹¹² In the following stanzas Albion rises as the ‘PROUDEST EMPIRE’, before, in the last stanza of the poem, already discussed above for its connections to Book 7 of the Aeneid, Europeans arrive on Australian shores—‘their Footsteps press’d the yielding sand’, as the next imperial generation rises.

Under Augustus, Rome became an enviable empire and boldly promoted its Trojan origins. After civil unrest following Julius Caesar’s assassination, Augustus is said to have ushered in a period of peace and prosperity.¹¹³ Macquarie, too, had brought about peace in the New South Welsh colony after a period of civil unrest under the governorship of William Bligh.¹¹⁴ Comparison to Augustus served the need to unite the unstable colony under the artifice of concord and affluence. Robinson drew on Roman Golden Age narratives that presented similar storylines and attributed the end of tumult being brought about by an ‘auspicious chief’ in order to present Macquarie’s administration as the beginning of a similar period of prosperity. In ‘Ode for the Queen’s Birthday, 1816’ the importance of Australia’s British founder is made clear:

Trophies like these [the riches of the Australian agricultural industry] shall spread from Clime to Clime,

Shelter’d thro’ Ages from the Spoils of Time;

And proud Prosperity shall prize the Land

That owes its culture to a Briton’s Hand!

And, when some future Bard’s historic Lays

Shall trace Australia thro’ progressive Days,

…

Here shall he Pause to venerate a Name –

A British Chief! Who on Australia’s shore,

First cherished Arts, and bade young Science soar.¹¹⁵

Here, Robinson casts the British as responsible for bringing arts and sciences to the antipodes, from which, a great and prosperous Australian empire would rise in the image of ancient Rome. The poem acknowledges Australia’s debt to Britain and looks both forward to a Golden Age of arts and science, and back to the moment of colonization.

The terms ‘British Chief’ and ‘Auspicious Chief’ are used throughout Robinson’s odes. Dryden names Aeneas ‘Auspicious Chief’ in Book 6 of the Aeneid:

Qui iuvenes! Quantas ostentant, aspice, vires,

atque umbrata gerunt civili tempora quercu!

Hi tibi Nomentum et Gabios urbemque Fidenam,

hi Collatinas imponent montibus arces,

Pometios Castrumque Inui Bolamque Coramque.

Haec tum nomina erunt, nunc sunt sine nomine terrae.

“Quin et avo comitem sese Mavortius addet

Romulus, Assaraci quem sanguinis Ilia mater

educet. Viden, ut geminae stant vertice cristae,

et pater ipse suo superum iam signat honore?

Auspicious Chief! thy race, in times to come,

Shall spread the conquests of imperial Rome—

Rome, whose ascending tow’rs shall heav’n invade,

Involving earth and ocean in her shade;

High as the Mother of the Gods in place,

And proud, like her, of an immortal race.

Then, when in pomp she makes the Phrygian round,

With golden turrets on her temples crown’d;

A hundred gods her sweeping train supply;

Her offspring all, and all command the sky.¹¹⁶

The towers, turrets and temples employed here by Virgil to denote the rise of a great civilization are also employed throughout Robinson’s poetry. In his vision of Australia’s great future, towers, turrets and domes feature prominently. As the leader of the colony, Robinson credits Macquarie as the agent of imperial progress, lauding his population of the landscape with markers of civilization.

Robinson did not limit his comparison of Macquarie to Augustus. In order to present a more well-rounded ruler, Robinson likened Macquarie to the Etruscan monarch Numa in a song performed at the Australia Day commemoration dinner in 1820. Here the poet credits the governor’s ‘paternal and patriot hand’ for the diffusion of ‘prosperity’s smile thro’ the land’. He predicts ‘a second rising Rome,/To rival Numa’s fame!’ will be brought about by Macquarie.¹¹⁷ Robinson’s comparisons in this and other poems conflate Macquarie’s leadership with that of Aeneas, Numa and Augustus, all of whom represent different stages of the Roman Empire’s development. Throughout his 1820 poem dedicated to the Governor, Robinson refers to Macquarie as ‘illustrious Chief’ and ‘Brave Chief’. In the penultimate stanza Robinson actually prophesies that the Governor will be remembered as a ‘time-honour’d King’ about whom bards will sing. In this poem Robinson’s recalls his references to King George as ‘Chief’ throughout his odes to date, retrospectively superimposing Macquarie’s leadership in the colony over that of the distant King. This conflation of Macquarie and King is further evident in ‘Song for the Commemoration Dinner, January 26 1820’, in which the Governor is again referred to as ‘Chief’, but this time in the final stanza that features almost verbatim in several of Robinson’s earlier odes:

To her CHIEF, whose paternal and patriot hand

Diffuses prosperity’s smile thro the land,

Let this toast be reserv’d, which no party will sever,

For it springs from one feeling—“MACQUARIE FOR EVER!”¹¹⁸

Elevating Macquarie to the status of King allows him to be conflated with the great historical founders of the earlier empires from which Robinson imagines the future Australian empire will spring. The conflation of leaders in Robinson’s poetry serves to elide the generations of imperial civilizations he had set up over the eleven-year span of his poetry.

Bringing Numa into the narrative also allowed Robinson to turn Australia’s convict origins into a parallel to Roman origins and Romulus’ asylum:

A Numa rose,—brave, sage, serene,

To rule her iron race;

A motley, heterogeneous brood,

For crimes, from different lands pursued

Of courage fierce, of manners rude

First laid her Empire’s base!¹¹⁹

Comparing Macquarie to Numa and acknowledging the humble origins of what would become the Australian nation is a way of making any future achievement all the better. In order to achieve greatness, the colony needed model leaders who could cultivate the necessary elements of civilization. The strength of future Australians would come from the combination of their great imperial pedigree and the exertion of the unprivileged and unsophisticated labourers who worked to build its foundations. After all, Robinson himself was a convict and needed to find a place for himself in Australia’s great origin story. Through the guidance of great leaders like Macquarie, who embodied the right combination of skills from leaders of the past, the next imperial civilization to rise in the antipodes (according to Robinson at least) would be blessed with perpetual prosperity.

This stanza also makes reference to Romulus’ asylum, comparing the origins of New South Wales to that of ancient Rome.¹²⁰ The comparison between the colony of New South Wales and Romulus’ Rome, established after declaring asylum for fugitives, criminals and any seeking refuge, was frequently made at the turn of the nineteenth century.¹²¹ In 1803, Arthur Phillip was hailed as ‘the Romulus of the Southern Pole…a superintendent of pick pockets’.¹²² The conception of Philip as a second Romulus endured into the late 19th century and is recorded as late as 1894: ‘Romulus must have been a kind of primordial Captain Arthur Phillip, and his Asylum as much a reality as the landing at Sydney Cove’.¹²³ Likening colonial convict origins to the asylum helped Europeans think about their current situation as the humble beginnings of what would become a great and prosperous society; where those who were broken by misfortune might be restored.¹²⁴ Reconciling the prospect of a grand future surrounded by the rabble of convicts, servicemen and free settlers, collectively referred to by Bentham in 1802 as ‘the very dregs of society’, and ‘unfit to live at large in society’, would have been difficult without such a convenient literary precedent.¹²⁵

This article has argued that Australia’s first poet laureate, Michael Massey Robinson, characterized the young antipodean colony of New South Wales as a new Rome in early stages of development, parented by the great British Empire and descended from the Trojan people, awaiting an eventual Golden Age. His poems projected a great imperial destiny for the fledgling colony that drew on epic precedent, intertwined with georgic representations of a rural ideal, to explain away the harsh realities of the Australian landscape, conflict with First Nations people and any anxieties about its lack of recognizable markers of European civilization. Robinson hoped that his oeuvre would function as the foundation of an Australian mythology, filling in the cultural gaps that he and his fellow settlers perceived in the cultural makeup of the Australian landscape, and ensuring that any future Australian civilization would take its place as the latest generation of imperial greatness stretching back all the way back to Troy, Aeneas and the foundation of ancient Rome.¹²⁶