On February 23, 2000 the Mangarrayi people were handed the title deeds to Elsey Station, a Northern Territory cattle station immortalised in Jeannie Gunn’s autobiographical novel We of the Never-Never (1907). Widely read by many generations of Australians, Gunn’s novel has played an influential part in establishing the outback and its special privations as a critical cultural interlocutor in the development of national consciousness. Gunn wrote of struggles against economic hardship, Aboriginal cattle spearing, environmental capriciousness and social isolation as part of the process of colonists domesticating themselves to the Australian continent. For many Australian readers in the first half of the 20th century, her written experiences personalised the ideological process of settlement by bringing elements of a distant frontier into the realm of daily life to an encompassing, ordinary language of settlement.

We of the Never-Never was not intended to establish a definitive account of Australian settlement but it came to encapsulate that process as a relatively undifferentiated and uncomplicated myth of the psychological and moral accommodations needed to establish European ownership of the country and displacement of Aborigines. Much has been said about Gunn’s original description of the murder of local Aborigines and subsequent sanitisation of this violence in later publications of the book where the description of the killings was removed. A film interpretation of the book, released in 1982, continued this elision, further cementing the virtuous elements of struggle with the land in the popular imagination.^[2] Through these works Elsey Station became mobilised as a key sign of settlement in the theatre of Australian cultural history, while the Mangarrayi continued to be displaced and unrecognised as the original and enduring owners to that country. In a very modern evocation of the enduring iconicity of Elsey Station the local radio station – Radio Never Never – claimed the region to be the genuine frontier, the place in which specific events embodied broader process of invasion, settlement and displacement across the nation. At that ‘genuine frontier’ on February 23, a reversal occurred and a series of new questions was posed about the apparatuses of colonialism and the frontier. If the monolithic discourse of Australian history is motivated by the displacement of Aboriginal people and the establishment of settlers as the natural occupants of the land, to what extent has this process rested on an inscrutability that submerged dialogue, exchange and encounter by presuming their cataclysmic proportions?

This collection starts with the assumption that while the classical Australian frontier tends to be located in the imaginative fertility of the outback and is to be characterised by racial conflict, a more problematic and challenging frontier embraces a greater set of relationships than appropriation, and deals with more diverse circumstances than violence. Our aim is to move beyond the consensus that the frontier is a recognisable tale of woeful cross-cultural encounters. In our rejection of the tendency to homogenise the frontier as a single process we recognise the corresponding homogeneities implied by the discursive entities of settler, Aborigine and indigenous. We therefore address frontier encounters as having the simultaneous features of exchange, perpetuation, transformation, reclamation and a greater sense of the limit of colonising influences than resistance, capture, seizure and violence entails. We also recognise that the radically asymmetrical relations of power that have historically operated between settlers and Aborigines have tended to suppress differences within settler and Aboriginal peoples. Debate about Australian frontiers has not always recognised that the pervasive effects of encounter have sometimes been curtailed by autonomous indigenous spaces beyond frontier history. This point is eloquently expressed by Stephen Muecke in Chapter 10 in his discussion of Boxer’s ability to enact an indigenous power based on an autonomous cultural geography that made contact with settlers discontinuous, fleeting and sometimes irrelevant in a period when the apparatuses of colonialism in the Kimberley exerted an abiding influence on indigenous lives.

Dislocating the frontier does not take as its place of departure a specific event or work that could be said to inaugurate the frontier as a distinctive process or idea. The essays that are collected here suggest continually occurring scenes of encounter wherein frontier is a conception of history and sociality that incorporates and moves beyond the assumption that history is a progressive embracement of modernity. The plurality of frontiers underlines the sense that it is a conception that rests on predicaments occasioned by difference and return, notions that are suggestively allied to evocations of nationhood. In Frederick Jackson Turner’s celebratory historiographical interpretation of the establishment of the American nation, he concluded that by 1890 the process of frontier settlement across the north American continent had ended.^[3] Frontier was, for Turner, variously assembled: it was ‘the history of the colonization of the Great West … an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement’; the encounter of hierarchically ordered social groups in which European immigrants were characterised as more socially complex and more able than indigenous inhabitants; a line of development distinguishing the energetic New World from the declining Old World of Europe; the accomplishment of civil society. History breaks in Turner’s historiography, little is left to the intervention of the past into the future, rather, the explanation of ‘national origins and national character by reference to the ever-present frontier of colonization’ is imagined as a unique process occasioned by the influence of specific environments and the peculiarities of settlement.^[4]

Much has been said about the ethnocentric, masculinist, nationalist biases in Turner’s frontier hypothesis and in this volume, Elizabeth Furniss charts the criticisms and debates that have occasioned the rejection and rehabilitation of frontier concepts in recent North American scholarship. Feminist writers have argued for a more explicit focus on gender in frontier analyses noting that the dominant place of white men in frontiers around the country has tended to marginalise women, Aborigines and ethnic minorities, exposing the frontier concept as a vital component in the determination of ideals of gender relations and family structures in settler society. It is important to note how Turner’s hypothesis about settler expansion and environmental influences on individual, social and civil development found its way into Australian literature and scholarship. Turner’s clear, untangled narrative of the material and cultural aspects of American settlement had the compelling features of all good (nationalist) myths: the delivery of powerful stories that draw on familiar symbols with economy and resonance that can be interpreted and elaborated in diverse contexts without the loss of simple, dramatic, narrative elements. While Turner was primarily concerned to account for American ideals, he was convinced his ideas were more ecumenical than national. His short list of frontier countries included Australia, and his work inspired others to search for evidence of similar virtues and civil developments in their own national settings.^[5]

Certainly the most influential interpretation of Turner in an Australian context is found in Russel Ward’s, The Australian Legend. In this work Turner’s emphasis on environment as a shaper of personal and national temperament is interpreted by Ward to account for the emergence of a ‘different kind of man’, a ‘typical Australian’ forged by ‘the outback ethos’, transformed from morally diminished convicts into a ‘morally improved “bushmen”’ by ‘the brute facts of Australian geography’. Ward embraced Turner’s combination of anti-imperial sentiments, characterisation of settlement as a process of opportunistically entering areas of ‘free’ land and the moral sovereignty granted by confrontation with Aborigines and environment as a process of the domestication of settlers. Ian McLean recognises that the employment of the Turnerian model by Ward was premised on the eradication of Aborigines, ideologically catered for by establishing the heritage of distinctive Australian characteristics borne of bush living and encounter.^[6] McLean considers this process of settler domestication to have produced a melancholic aesthetic informing much early colonial art.^[7] In Peter Brunt’s assessment of McLean’s argument he registers his unease that racial violence should inevitably assume a central place in the foundational myths of settler nations such as Australia.^[8] There is more, though, to be said about the complex and deeply embedded place of violence in the ideological field generated by the frontier.

Where it provides a confident and authoritative account of settlements, frontier discourse creates the conditions for the forgetting of original violences. This process of forgetting is more apparent than real though as the ‘hidden histories’ of violent encounter constantly haunt settlement.^[9] At those moments that buried accounts of violence break through established history, the history of settlement is beset by a twin ambivalence. On the one hand, accounting for frontier violences asserts local histories of encounter over generalising national narratives of settlement. Operating in the opposite direction, violence becomes a precondition for nationhood, associating the shedding of blood with sacrifice and elevating violent encounter into a kind of civil action. To the extent that sacrifice and violence are more commonly recognised through the Gallipoli story as inaugurating Australian nationhood, they operate within longstanding discourses of masculine nationfounding in Western liberal democracies.^[10] However, the capacity for indigenous Australians to ‘speak back’ and ‘talk up’ to dominant histories through their own long-standing generational memories besets celebratory encounter by destabilising the foundational heroism associated with sacrificial elements of violent encounter.^[11]

Ward’s willing evocation of the bushman as an Australian frontiersman counteracted any sense that the vigour and entrepreneurial attitudes implied by the Turnerian thesis could be replaced by less sanguine features. Fred Alexander had argued that the process of settlement had resulted in a deterioration in the Australian male character, such that by the 1940s laziness and subservience were prevalent.^[12] Alexander regarded this depletion as resulting from the deep incorporation of English values and institutions in Australian settler-colonial society. When Paul Sharp later elaborated on this idea, he added that frontier expansion was also destructive to Aborigines, an expression of the view that Aboriginal people would inevitably decline in the face of prosperous, energetic northern European immigrants.^[13] Alexander’s bleak regard for male character and Sharp’s account of ruinous race relations in Australia faulted the seductive persuasion of the frontier as a series of heroic struggles by settlers against Aborigines. Their pessimistic musings on the imperial utopia of a distinctive Australian civil society are early examples, later exemplified in the diverse works of C. D. Rowley, Henry Reynolds, Noel Loos, Deborah Bird Rose, and Patrick Wolfe, of the desire to engage in redemptive history by confronting violent settler-Aboriginal encounters and wrestling with the enigmatic moral episteme that places that particular violence at the core of Australian nationhood.^[14]

Contemporary Australian frontier studies have bifurcated into remnant interpretations of Turner’s ideas on the one hand^[15] to a diversity of approaches wherein frontier is taken to be a discursive trope that settler society generates to give authority to the formations of civil society and cultural and gendered hegemonies.^[16] Certainly the most well-known contemporary works on Australian frontiers are by Reynolds whose chronicling of settler-Aboriginal conflict has found great purchase in Australian studies.^[17] Less well known but no less considerable has been the attention Rowley gave in a trilogy of books published through the 1970s detailing the radical changes affected on Aboriginal people by Australian governments since British colonisation.^[18] Despite their considerable differences both employ the frontier to interrogate the extent to which the nation-state ‘Australia’ is founded on the violence and depredation of colonial encounter. In doing so they confront the ‘cult of forgetfulness’ that characterised white Australia’s ignorance of the effects of colonialism on Aboriginal people. Their work also encapsulates the paradox embedded in frontier logic: in confronting Aboriginal dispossession and slaughter as unacknowledged presences within settler naturalisation narratives, a consensus is created about the relationship between history, settler identity and social order and land.^[19] Rowley’s adherence to Turner’s successive frontiers model and Reynolds’s recognition of the plurality of Aboriginal reactions to European settlement does not shift ‘frontier’ as an ideological process that defines the privileged status of ‘settler’ by reference to encounter with Aborigines. In frontier logic Aborigines define settler – the alterity of Aborigines is respected because they are necessary to the constant reaffirmation of settlerhood. The most immediate problem with enjoining the complexity of encounter to the goal of creating a distinctive settler nation is the difficulty of acknowledging or accounting for the spaces of encounter beyond the encompassing rubric of frontier. It is precisely at this point that the authors here announce their intention to dislocate frontier historiography, and at the same time to probe the symbolic energy of the frontier in its refusal to relinquish its territorial hold over the terms within which settler Australia conceives an Australian social order.