Kangaroo (poem)
1819 poem by Barron Field
"Kangaroo" is an 1819 poem by English-born Australian author Barron Field.
It was first published in the author's collection First Fruits of Australian Poetry, the first book of poetry published in Australia.
Synopsis
The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature states that the poem "depicts the animal as an Antipodean oddity, an anomaly of the animal world yet typical of the equally strange Australian landscape.".
Critical reception
The Oxford Literary History of Australia states: "Field's poetry laments the lack of either classical or familiar poetic associations in the alien environment, a lament that was mocked at the time and has been since for its pretension, but which has also been read as a witty parody of colonial literary pretentiousness."
In The Cambridge Companion to Australian Poetry Michael Farrell noted that "The historical precedence of "The Kangaroo," as well as in anxiety over Australia's rhyme with failure as an analogy to the colonial enterprise itself, marks it as a benchmark poem for subsequent settler poems."
Publication history
After the poem's initial publication in First Fruits of Australian Poetry in 1819 it was reprinted as follows:
The Examiner (London, UK), 16 January 1820, p40
Geographical Memoirs on New South Wales edited by Barron Field, John Murray, 1825
The Gleaner, 26 April 1827
Once a Month, vol. 1 no.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Kangaroo (poem)” is 1819 poem by Barron Field. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Kangaroo, poem and Barron, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “1819 poem by Barron Field” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q138303475. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1819, 1820, 1825 and 1827.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kangaroo (poem)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.