Research

Settling Poetry: Reprinting Poems in Colonial South Africa and Australia

Image: ‘News from Home’ by George Baxter. Print, 1853. Courtesy of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Dr Lara Atkin and Dr Nathan Garvey (UCD)

As Jason Rudy has recently argued, poetry had a vital role in establishing the sense of community inherent in the settler colonialism of the nineteenth century. Challenging Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr’s notion of a ‘global imperial commons’, Rudy notes that ‘poetry adapted more quickly to colonial spaces, allowing for more local forms of expression’, and was thus intrinsic to the emergence of literary culture in colonial societies. But while local poetry was clearly an important form of self-expression for fledgling settler societies, it occupied the same space as poetry reprinted and repurposed from the press elsewhere. This project explores the nature, role, and function of reprinted poetry in early colonial newspapers from South Africa (the Cape Colony) and Australia (New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land). Working from the premise that the imperial press operated as a ‘discursive mediator of identity’ for Anglophone settlers, the project takes up Natalie Huston’s call to examine how newspaper poetry ‘participated in the larger shared public discourse of current events’ by examining the ways in which poetry reprints reflected and refracted the political concerns of the emerging colonial press in the 1820s and 1830s. Furthermore, while the British colonies in the southern hemisphere in the early nineteenth century faced comparable challenges in terms of the development of civil society and the emergence of a free press, local political issues and cultural conditions reflected different patterns of taste in ‘settler poetry’. This project seeks to establish the role that reprinted poetry played in helping to constitute the bourgeois public sphere that enabled new British-colonial identities to emerge in the settler colonies of the early nineteenth century. By turning to a previously unexamined archive of print culture artefacts, the project explores how the circulation of reprinted poetry helped to shape early settler-colonial identity at the southern reaches of the Anglophone diaspora.

Publications and Presentations:

• Atkin, L. and Garvey, N. ‘Settling Poetry: Reprinting Poems in the Early Press in Colonial South Africa and Australia’, British Association of Victorian Studies Annual Conference 2018,’ Victorian Patterns’, University of Exeter. 29-31 August 2018.