(Re)settling Poetry: The Culture of Reprinting and the Poetics of Emigration in the 1820s Southern Settler Colonies

Abstract

Poetry played a vital role in establishing the sense of community inherent in the settler-colonialism of the nineteenth century. This essay contends that localising the poetry of emigration to reflect the conditions of colonial settlement was more than just a question of cultural replication and adaptation. Drawing on a previously unexamined archive of original and reprinted verse from the newspapers of the Cape Colony and Australia (Van Dieman’s Land and New South Wales), this paper reveals the work that reprinted emigration verse did in the labour of community building in which the settler press was actively and vocally engaged during the 1820s. By restoring these poems to their original publication contexts alongside lead articles, correspondence and advertising, this chapter argues that metropolitan emigration poetry could be re-framed by canny colonial newspaper editors through editorial headnotes and judicious juxtaposition. It shows that editors frequently encouraged colonists to read metropolitan emigration poetry against the grain as part of a deliberately constructed counter-discourse that drew the attention of colonial and metropolitan readers to the disjuncture between metropolitan representations of emigration and the material realities of colonial life.