How might this comparative perspective help us to understand how Australian history, indigenous/settler relations, and the northern ‘frontier’ have been imagined? To me, what is most striking about Australia is the deep sense that conquest has never, truly been achieved. In responding to the native title movement, opponents clearly convey a deep sense of pervasive victimisation. During the recent Wik debate over the existence of native rights on pastoral leases, pastoralists in Queensland were reported to be ‘taking up arms’ to defend themselves against an anticipated indigenous attack.^[72] As previously mentioned, Pauline Hanson herself has expressed concern that indigenous corporations in Queensland were buying up pastoral properties and engaging in a kind of economic takeover of the country. There is, in short, a lingering culture of terror in Australia – a constructed fear of indigenous reprisal – that permeates much of the public opposition to the native title movement.

This contrasts significantly with public discourse in Canada. To be sure, in Canada there are the armed indigenous blockades, occupations, and so on. Such protests and blockades have become even more frequent through the 1990s as land claims remain unresolved and a younger indigenous population becomes increasingly impatient with government intransigence over the land question. There certainly are unresolved fears of indigenous reprisals against non-indigenous settlers and governments.^[73] Yet public opposition to Aboriginal land claims is less often characterised by fear than it is by a paternalistic smugness in which governments are criticised for being excessively ‘generous’ to indigenous peoples, and politicians and the police both are criticised for ‘putting up’ with acts of indigenous ‘disobedience’, again evoking the image of indigenous children getting away with bad behaviour.

I don’t mean to oversimplify the kinds of nationalist, historical narratives in either Canada or Australia, narratives which are much more complex, fluid and variable than I’ve portrayed here. I haven’t traced at length, for example, how supporters of the native title movement draw upon particular images of national culture and history to support their cause. But these dominant narratives do seem to constrain the possibilities of public discourse. For example, in Australia Henry Reynolds has played a critical role in bringing these historical questions to the attention of the general public, and has been one of the most popular and effective advocates for native title. Yet he has captured public attention not by challenging, but by modifying dominant historical narratives. Reynolds attempts to secure some positive public space for Aboriginality by constructing Aboriginal people as ‘black pioneers’ who contributed to the building of the Australian nation, thus retaining the image of pioneering progress that is central to the frontier myth.^[74]

What influence might these narratives of victimisation, of a lack of faith in the completion of colonisation, have on portrayals of north Australia and the northern ‘frontier’? Deborah Bird Rose has identified these themes in north Australian pastoralists’ sense of relationship to the northern landscape. While pastoralists have a deep love for the country they have ‘conquered’ and now inhabit, they nevertheless feel a deep sense of their transience in that country. Pastoralists, Rose suggests, are living in a moment of perpetual liminality, a ‘Ground Zero’ in the colonial moment, unable to imagine the survival of the pastoral lifestyle and their future generations in those regions.^[75]

While local narratives in north Australia resonate with the more general victimisation narratives elsewhere, these narratives are also strongly shaped by local conditions. In part, the uncertainties of northern pastoralists are linked to local economic conditions: the difficulties of the pastoral industry in the north, the insecurity over pastoral leases, and so on. Quite in contrast are the public histories found in the north-western Queensland city of Mount Isa, where the mining industry has been booming since the 1950s, has brought a level of almost unprecedented wealth to local workers, and has only in the last few years begun to decline. Here the histories encountered in the public spaces around town – tourism displays, the city’s historical festivals, popular books, magazine and newspaper articles – all are proud, brash, confident, and arrogant. They speak of a linearity of history, of successful colonisation, of the ‘disappearance’ of local indigenous tribes (and thus the resolution of any outstanding historical questions concerning native title), and of a future of unlimited progress and prosperity for all.^[76]

Thus both local factors and national traditions contribute to the process of imagining the north Australian ‘frontier’. But this process also reflects similarities with other settler-colonial societies. In both Canada and Australia, the cultural problematic inherent to settler societies – being newcomers in a land once controlled by indigenous peoples – requires stories legitimizing arrival, occupation, dispossession, and continued domination of indigenous peoples. And in both countries, the ‘frontier’ – the early process of encounter between colonists and the new land, its unknown territories, its indigenous peoples – retains its salience as a key source of symbols for the ongoing construction of official histories and national identities.