The focus on Aborigines as the defining ‘other’ to settlers in the Australian nation is no more than a recognition that the basic parameters of frontier ideology produces a set of relationships wherein the symbolic function of Aborigines is to create the privileged and naturalised status of the settler. But there is a further distinction to be drawn which extends from Juliet Mitchell’s recognition that ‘we live as ideas’, that the circulation of symbolic order through social being and individual experience not only creates alliances of identity and power but allows for more negotiable, liminal, contested and transformative exchanges to occur between different groups of people. This is not to suggest that the grounds of exchange exist beyond forces of repression and intolerance or imply compatibility and free-flowing authentic reciprocity. More, that the discourses and practices of Australian frontier cross-cultural encounter that wend their way through to politico-economic structures already evince the influence of the subaltern symbolic systems and lifeways of Australia’s indigenous peoples.
This infiltrative movement within an already established logic that establishes colonial rule over the lands and seas of Australia’s indigenous peoples is most recently evident in the historic 1992 Mabo v. Queensland judgement of the Australian High Court. This case involved a claim by Meriam people to ownership of land on the island of Mer (Murray Island) in eastern Torres Strait, north Queensland. The Mabo decision recognised for the first time that indigenous, or native, title to land, which had hitherto been excluded from Australian common law, could be protected by the common law. Prior to this decision the principle of terra nullius, that Australia was uninhabited or at best inhabited by peoples who had no systems of social organisation and property ownership that compelled colonial recognition, gave exclusive radical title of Australian lands to the Crown. The Mabo decision overturned the legal basis of colonial sovereignty, recognising rights to indigenous use and ownership of land where they were not extinguished by the Crown, necessitating a series of legislative actions by the Commonwealth that validated pastoral and mining leases and constrained the procedures by which Australia’s indigenous population could proceed on native title claims (Native Title Act 1993 and 1998).[20]
Despite the Commonwealth’s legislative attempts to rein in the property law implications of native title, the moral hierarchies of colonised and coloniser established under the shelter of terra nullius became subject to searching investigation among the Australian population. If there was ever a consensus operating amongst the majority of the non-indigenous population about the moral rights to settlement that colonial occupation ensured, it was surely shattered in the Mabo decision. Ensuing cultural and political debates revealed agonistic and antagonistic public attitudes around the treatment of Australia’s indigenous population, both past and present, and subjected the ‘doctrine of the settled colony’ to intense public scrutiny.[21] Legal entitlement became inextricably linked to questions of national identity. The seemingly inviolable ridge between legal precedent and settlement that was ruptured by Mabo also destabilises the demands of oppositional categories of self and other, settler and indigenous, colonised and coloniser that informs the presumptions of established frontiers. However, if this destabilisation amounts to no more than a vulgar deconstruction of types or narratives or lumps together all differences into a single ‘other’, then we have missed the responses to alterity that are the true terrain of the frontier trope. In this elusive, fragmented, fissured space the ‘attractions and aversions’ (to borrow a phrase from Adorno) of encounter are compellingly demonstrated. It is perhaps an overly didactic observation, but it should be stated that the acculturative, hybrid overtones are not the necessary endgame of cross-cultural interaction. In keeping with the project of ‘dislocating the frontier,’ theme, some chapters attest to the incommensurable differences of cultural attitudes and philosophies that inform encounter. They compel us to be alert to unacknowledged indigenous and non-indigenous expressions of describing encounter, force a re-evaluation of what constitutes frontier; how it is experienced, imagined, and absorbed; how it discriminates, and how it is opposed. If frontier mythology has traditionally been understood as indiscriminate apology for conquest then these recognitions show that this configuration has yet to determine a coeval indigenous register.
The notion that the frontier naturalises processes of inhabitation by colonisers to colonised lands is carefully explored by Liz Furniss’s examination of the usages of frontier symbolism in recent Canadian and Australian political discourse (Chapter 2). She begins with a survey of the major theoretical trends in North American scholarship on the relationship between concepts of frontier and nationhood. Of particular value is her overview of critical approaches to Turner’s frontier thesis that have occurred since the 1960s and have come to be referred to as the New Western History. In concluding her overview she raises questions that point to the disjuncture between the analytical (in)adequacy of the term and the populist power of associated symbolisms. Through an insightful discussion of the anti-indigenous rhetorics that have recently been employed in Canadian and Australian political discourse, she demonstrates that the popular usages of frontier thinking in both countries are at once too fluid for concise analytical capture, and yet tend strongly to situate the autonomy and livelihood of Aboriginal peoples as a national threat. Furniss’s analysis of these two issues leads her to conclude that scholarly uses of the term collude with populist understandings as shared moments in nationalist mythology.
Collusion between contrasting ideas or conflicting groups holds forth the possibility that on the way past the dispossessing aspects of encounter a qualitative exchange between cultures resulting in redemptive advancement might occur. Taken at face value, the story of Australian artist Ainslie Roberts’s relatively benign experiences of relating to the Aboriginal people and country of Palka-karrinya (Central Mount Wedge station), Central Australia, suggests such an inter-cultural dialogue. But, as Deborah Bird Rose shows in Chapter 3, the devil is in the detail, and in Roberts’s case his personal and artistic fascination with Aboriginal land sacrality mirrors that stream in the Australian imagination that seeks, through mystical yearnings, a cure for past injustices. Through an analysis of Roberts’s Palka-karrinya influenced work and his relationship to the ethnologist Charles Mountford, Rose is able to show how Roberts’s personal quest for meaning was not only an expression of national existential concern, but transformed local religious affinities into Jungian-like religious universals. Rose recognises that this transformation effects an effacement of Aboriginal cultural expressions and uses colonial land-based resource use language to evoke the subtle violences informing these processes. Thus, Aboriginal knowledge is an ‘ore body that could be mined by anyone with the talent for tapping into the unconscious.’ That said, Rose cautions that what looks like the erasure of Palka-karrinya specificity in Roberts’s work should be understood in terms of the transportation of highly specific Aboriginal invocations of environmental connections and iconography to Australian metropoles. The original Palka-karrinya conceptions continue despite Roberts’s personal encounters and artistic transformations.
The expansion of inward-looking boundaries by encounter with Aboriginal people and place are closely allied to an experience of frontier as an outward moving boundary between the ordered and familiar and the unfamiliar and disordered. Nicholas Gill’s examination of immigrant pastoralists’ narratives of settlement in Central Australia stands in a critical relationship to the sense that the frontier is an expanding, overcoming boundary (Chapter 4). Their tendency to define relationships to land largely in terms of personal and family bodily engagement with land leads Gill to question ‘whether the relationship between settler pastoralists is comparable to that of Aboriginal people.’ The answers are both mundane and surprising. At one level the employment by both Aborigines and settlers of the idea that creatively interacting with the land brings about social order and shapes the environment would seem commensurable. The linkages, though undeniably present, belie radically different affinities: the acts of ancestral beings unfold to weave Aboriginal people, land and law together in spiritual as well as experiential ways. By contrast settlers understand their arrival in Central Australia as a homecoming, awakening a vacant, unfamiliar land to its fertile potential. In contrast to the strong sense of masculine wrestling with land that Gunn describes, Central Australian settlers project a more feminine imagining of nurturance on to the landscape.
In Chapter 5 Jay Arthur takes an innovative approach to frontier landscapes by treating water as an active agent with whom settlers have had to contend and which forever disappoints them by failing to conform to expectations. She works with the transitional edges between watercourses and land and notes that their ‘drying out’, as they gradually disappear into man-made containers, mirrors an increasingly regulated hydrography in Australia. In the following chapter (Chapter 6) Pat Lowe shows how seemingly innocuous events, such as losing objects and coping with car breakdowns, are as rich with meaning about the frontier as are public conflicts over ownership of natural resources. Through her relationship with Jimmy Pike, a Walmajarri man, she moves from her initial experience of the Upper Sandy Desert as monotonous sameness to an understanding of the complexity of shapes and textures that inform Walmajarri relationships to these spaces. We are also reminded by Lowe that while she is able to develop understanding of and relationships with desert country, for many Aboriginal people who were originally resident in this region and who now reside in the Kimberley towns, separation from these lands, whether by force or force of events, induces a kind of disorienting exile.
The capacity to comprehend difference is presented by Libby Robin as a heroic process of subjecting what is alien to familiar principles of order (Chapter 7). The story Robin recounts is the quest for the scientific classification of platypuses found in northern Queensland in the latter decades of the 19th century by Australian and European scientists. The echoes of an antipodean fabulity play about this creature, as does the struggle to overcome the marginality of Australian science to the English scientific establishment. However, it is Robin’s singular achievement to note that this famous moment of imperial traffic between the Australian colony and metropolis was entirely dependent on another imperial exchange between explorers and Aborigines. Platypuses and other anomalies such as lungfish and echidna, presented classificatory problems for scientists of the time as well as the enticing possibility that they might bridge between seemingly discrete classes of animals. Libby notes that 19th century scientists regularly hired Aboriginal assistance in scientific expeditions, but scientists on the hunt for platypuses, lungfish and echidna relied on huge numbers of Aboriginal people, up to 150 by William Caldwell, who were hired for both their labour and knowledge of ecology and animal habitat. While European scientists were yet to understand the developmental stages of these animals’ growth, Aboriginal identification and capture of animals at various stages of their life cycle allowed scientific understanding to develop, making them genuine but unacknowledged co-workers in discovery. The exchange of labour and knowledge between Aborigine and scientific explorer translated into the traffic between colony and metropole of the denouement of discovery – names. Once classified and garbed with Latin names these animals were birthed into an imperial scientific order operating independently and indifferently to local symbolic or evaluative systems.
The scientific use of frontier concepts in gaining an imaginative purchase on remote Australia offers the possibility that national aspirations for economic self-sufficiency might be fulfilled. Tim Sherratt examines atomic utopias, and the fear/hope duality founded in frontier connections between science and progress (Chapter 8). He focuses particularly on the energy industry of North Australia, and interrogates the imagining of the nation’s future embedded in the scientific frontier imagination. The progressive aspects of frontier thinking become glaringly obvious in the imagined post Second World War atomic age. Sherratt notes that the nationalistic language of expansion and opportunity attached to the atomic utopia, Australia Unlimited, has its own curious life and reappears in contemporary popular debates over Australia’s economic future. He suggests that the futuristic implications of recurring alignments of science, frontier and economy are always shadowed by the accumulation of past dreams and hopes.
These chapters have explored aspects of settler’s attempt to lodge themselves in land that is already invigorated by its own geographic distinctiveness and indigenous bearings. Each chapter remarked on a frontier tabula rasa imagining that ideally absents indigenous people, while uncovering the extent to which indigenous Australians are present or implicated in such imaginings. The following three chapters look to Aboriginal engagements with frontier practice, and examine some of the ways in which Aboriginal people’s cultural practice destabilises and critiques frontier imagination. The authors work from spaces adjacent to the frontier, where transformations and distortions are possible.
In my own chapter, Chapter 9, I discuss the place of rodeo in frontier imagination, particularly Aboriginal organised rodeos that occur throughout the Kimberley. Rodeo events are sometimes regarded as carrying the symbolic structures of classical frontiers in that they replay, through competitive bovine and horse riding, relationships of racial and environmental dominance. In terms of their capacity to bring together people involved in cattle grazing, rodeos have replaced race meets as the most common rural festival in northwestern Australia. Also, Aboriginal rodeos draw attention to changes in land ownership in the Kimberley pastoral industry where Aboriginal people own almost a third of the pastoral leases there. This situation is immensely different to the ration life of station camps that Aboriginal people lived in prior to the late 1960s where they were unable to exercise proprietary control over station lands and cattle.[22] The performance of Aboriginal cowboys in rodeos prises open a provocative, inter-cultural space where the conditions for identity frisson and exchange across cultures does not suggest an inability to traverse turbulent pasts, cultural boundaries and distinctive geographic grounding of peoples in the world.
In Chapter 10 Stephen Muecke dramatically shifts our perception by describing a Kalkatungu man named Boxer, a maban, a ‘magic’ who created the Djanba cult and who lived with the Duracks in the East Kimberley. Boxer’s life on the white-owned stations and his Djanba response implies different senses of ‘order’ and unsettling understandings of inside and outside. Just as importantly Muecke presents Boxer as both a cultural critic and a cultural innovator. As innovator Boxer heralded new social arrangements and world concepts amongst Aboriginal people; as critic Boxer shakes things up by inaugurating, through Djanba, a powerful intellectual response to whitefella ways and technology. And if, as Muecke says, Boxer is best approached through deconstructive method, then the rewards seem great for Boxer appears as a philosopher of renown, a man whose performative response to the Kimberley pastoral frontier opens up paths of understanding and investigation beyond the familiar landmarks of Aboriginal resistance to, or complicity with, the frontier situation. Through Boxer’s Djanba we are granted an enhanced understanding of an Aboriginal intellectual and creative endeavour that acknowledges the critical and open-ended negotiations, which mark Aboriginal efforts towards survival in frontier situations.
The following chapter provides an account of Aboriginal reclamation of country that was abandoned by previous generations of Aboriginal people. In Chapter 11 Andrew McWilliam describes the movement of people and names through the Fitzmaurice River region in western Northern Territory. We are introduced to an unfamiliar Aboriginal frontier that is becoming increasingly familiar for many Aboriginal people around Australia. As a consequence of favourable accounts of the pastoral potential of the region generated by A. C. Gregory, a number of stations, including Victoria River Downs, were established during the 1880s, leading to a gradual out-migration of the Aboriginal population from the basin. McWilliam describes a number of other boundaries that the river demarcates: the extent of sub-section naming systems and ritual subincision practices; and newer land uses expressed by Aboriginal freehold land on the northern side and army-owned land on the southern side. Surprisingly, the different ‘exdigenous’ (settler) land uses have not resulted in a wide array of place names, Through his work for the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority, McWilliam finds that the region is more of a terra ignomia than a known geography for settlers. Likewise for Aboriginal people with traditional attachments to the area, there is much enigmatic space around the river despite ongoing reaffirmation and reclamation of the area. The Aboriginal depopulation of the region has resulted in an emptiness.