He appears to be everything that you say of him and I am very much prejudiced in his favour already from his mild modest and conciliating manners, and I am persuaded he will prove a great acquisition and blessing to this colony".

An echo of this may be found in the description of Field by John Dunmore Lang as a "weak silly man who fancied himself a poet born".

Sir Thomas Brisbane, writing to Earl Bathurst in January 1824, stated that Field "had embraced every opportunity of falsely and foully slandering me and my government".

But Brisbane could be irascible if he thought his honour or dignity was touched, and his first ground of complaint appears to have been that "during his first two years in the colony, Field had never once entered Government House".

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 1836 Crabb Robinson spoke of intending to visit him at Gibraltar, and in 1841 Field printed another small volume of verse, Spanish Sketches, at the press of the garrison library there.

Field's claim to distinction does not rest entirely on the fact that he wrote the first volume of verse to appear in Australia, he also founded the first savings bank in June 1819.