Ainslie Roberts’s death head exposes the open secret at the heart of terra nullius – that nullius, the erasure, ends up destroying the beloved terra.

Frontier redemption is here displayed as a violent commingling of desire and death. The violence is omnipresent because what settlers desire they cannot achieve without killing everything in the long run. Desire produces death. Death produces a hollowness that fills with desire. Desire produces more death. Ainslie Roberts showed us this when his desire to paint outback Australia took him to Palka-karrinya. His long-term action toward the site was to imagine it on paper and on canvas. On the kitchen wall in the Central Mount Wedge homestead it may be that he painted the devastating knowledge that he had nothing to give that could enhance the life of the place.

When we were at Central Mt Wedge for the land claim, we camped in the old Waudby homestead. We lived with these paintings and I, for one, couldn’t eat in the kitchen. I worried about our own gaze – it seemed to flatten everything before us. We dredged the mother lode for evidence, and roamed voraciously across landscapes, lives, sites, and ritual actions. I told myself that we were there to listen, and that from this courtroom drama could come legal standing with respect to the land that would make a genuine difference in the life of the place and the people. This was true, and I am not aiming to denigrate a piece of legislation that was benevolent in its inception and that is radically altering power relations in the Northern Territory. Nor would I wish to denigrate the evident pride and pleasure with which the traditional owners displayed their knowledge. Legal practice, however, ensured our right to know a great deal, and I slipped back and forth between an appreciation of the positive aspects of this drama, and an awareness of the predatory quality of our high beam gaze as it worked across other people’s lives in search of the bits and pieces that it labels evidence.

In the interests of natural justice, evidence in a land claim has to be accessible. People’s words are recorded, translated if necessary, transcribed, and printed out for all to consult, except in the case of ‘restricted’ evidence that is not freely available to all but is fully available, as appropriate, within the context of the judicial process. Legal practice, formulated to protect the interests of all parties, fragments knowledge before it even encounters it because it asserts that some, and only some, forms of information count as evidence. The best lawyers cast a narratival net over the fragments and pull them into a drama of proof. Cross-examining lawyers seek to undo the drama – to hammer, probe, disconnect, and thus further to disintegrate the bits and pieces that were, in any case, fragments to begin with.

At Central Mt Wedge, as on many other land claims, Aboriginal people interrupted legal practice. At Palka-karrinya and other sites they sang. These were beautiful moments: people’s faces lit up, their voices rose and worked in the gorges, resonating to the place, and filling the area with invocative communication. Back at camp, people made paintings on the ground and on their bodies. They sang the country as they painted it, and they sang it as they danced it. Their performatives were for the country, and at the same time they captured legal practice and brought it into their own law. People melded the power of place with their own performative power to convince everyone present that they were the owners of the place in their own terms as well as in the terms of the Land Rights Act. Their action folded legal practice, its flattening gaze and its fragmenting search for evidence, into reparative and regenerative ritual.

My analysis has landed me back in the binary stated so succinctly by Stephen Muecke: Aborigines are providing the eros to our thanatos.^[36] He has a good point, and even as we reject binaries in favour of the more complicated and entangled journeys of life in the time of rapidly shifting powers, it is proper, I believe, to honour eros wherever it may be found. With that in mind, I wish to note that Roberts’s work appeared at a time when relations between Aboriginal people and settler-descended people were on the cusp of major change. He hoped that his work would foster respect among white people for Aboriginal people, and his immensely popular work helped bring about the social changes that led to citizenship, land rights, and the Mabo decision. In spite of what now appears as an overwhelming presence of thanatos, Roberts gave eros a worm hole into settler consciousness.

Mountford spent a large portion of his life studying Aboriginal cultural fragments, and his views about the spirit of place were percipient in their insistence on the locality of it all. But while the work carried out by traditional owners may indeed have its roots in millennia of history (as Mountford contended), the power of place continues in the world not out of some passivity of endurance or timeless universalism. The power of place is interactive, reflexive, mutual. The Aboriginal owners of this place do the work that keeps the place vital, active in the world, and reflexively engaged with living time. The astonishing thing about frontier violence is that death does not always have the final word.