This chapter investigates the penal colony in Australia as a radical extension of European systems of social discipline and moral transformation. It considers how poets in colonial Australia faced a multitude of tasks, including the adaptation of British literary cultures to new territories, developing a sense of colonial belonging, taking imaginary possession of Indigenous lands, and also occasionally expressing ambivalence to Indigenous dispossession. The chapter discusses how poets responded to early administrative structures, with many engaging with a satiric form known as pipes that circulated clandestinely. While some poetry embraced a more ironised and alienated poetics, other poetry such as Michael Massey Robinson’s odes reinforced a Virgil-influenced alignment of land cultivation and moral improvement. The chapter then considers Barron Field’s nation-building use of poetry and the relationship between poetry and promotion of the unwritten doctrine of terra nullius.