Barron Field

Barron Field (23 October 1786 – 11 April 1846) was an English-born Australian judge and poet.

Early life

Barron Field was born in Torquay, Devon, England on 23 October 1786; he was the second son of London surgeon Henry Field and his wife Esther née Barron. Field worked for a time as theatrical critic for The Times, and by the mid 1810s he was friends with Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt, and the author of the play Antiquity: A Farce (1808), though this appears to have been unperformed.

Judge in New South Wales

In 1816 Field accepted a commission as judge of the Supreme Court of Civil Jurisdiction of NSW, and arrived in Sydney on 24 February 1817, on board the female convict ship Lord Melville. Governor Lachlan Macquarie was, at first, impressed with Field, though he later had cause to amend that impression. The work was re-issued in 1823 with three added poems.

After he had returned to England, Field edited Geographical Memoirs on New South Wales (1825) which, among other things, introduced new species of plants, such as Boronia anemonifolia A.Cunn.

Gibraltar and later life

Field accepted the position of advocate-fiscal in Ceylon in December 1828. He was soon afterward appointed judge of the Court of Civil Pleas at Gibraltar. Field had a disagreement with the Gibraltar Governor, Sir William Houston, over the handling of a case involving a Spanish smuggler ship, the Guerrera. In 1841 he retired from his position due to ill health and returned to England. Spanish Sketches (1841)