The strength of Australian outback mythology in providing a blueprint for what Australian society, landscapes and history ought to be, lies at least partly in its ‘lack of specificity in time and space’^[1], coupled with retrospect. Deborah Bird Rose has argued that such free-floating retrospect diverts attention from ‘here and now of our lives’, and militates against dealing with the consequences of Australia’s colonial past and present.^[2] The inland and north of Australia, the so-called ‘frontier’, in a spatial sense, are, and have been, places where optimistic non-indigenous assessments of land have been subject to regular appraisal and debate.^[3] They are also areas where the treatment and status of indigenous people have remained significant social and political issues, and where national and regional conflicts over indigenous land ownership and title have been most focused, particularly in relation to extensive pastoralism. Despite this, outback, or frontier, mythology remains important in providing symbols and normative ideals that shape perceptions and landscapes of the inland and north. The avenues by which this occurs are manifold and are diffused across Australian political and cultural life.

This chapter examines one avenue by which pastoral landscapes are represented and validated, the production of pastoral memory and historical writing from the Alice Springs pastoral district in the southern Northern Territory (NT). This analysis arises from fieldwork and examination of documentary sources undertaken in the period 1996–98.^[4] The production and consumption of memory and history in the Alice Springs area are significant for the authority they carry at various scales, but particularly in the context of the NT^[5] where differences in indigenous and non-indigenous values, aspirations and interpretations of the past are features of everyday life and politics.

Recent debates over the future of land use and management in the inland and conflicts over the existence of native title on pastoral leasehold land have illustrated many aspects of contemporary frontier ideologies in Australia.^[6] These conflicts are struggles not only over land as a material resource, as a factor of production, but also over landscapes as loci of personal, group and national identity, meaning, belonging, experience and what Furniss calls the ‘burden of history’, the consequences of indigenous dispossession.^[7] These struggles are not simply over legal property rights, but also over property rights grounded in moralities based in relationships to land. These are matters of legitimacy, not simply legality. Confronted by the consequences of past acts of Aboriginal dispossession, and the survival of Aboriginal cultures, rural settler Australians have largely looked to the land to build a sense of legitimacy, and to tell a story of benign settlement, rather than state-sanctioned and enforced land occupation and control of indigenous people.

In inland Australia, where the physical transformations of agriculture have not been possible and are not visually evident, the strategies required for this have been somewhat different than in other areas. As elsewhere,^[8] however, the strategies of legitimation and the mutually constitutive process of building identities and landscapes, has relied, at least partially, upon particular traditions of remembering the past to interpret the present and to provide normative guidance for the future.

It might be imagined that Australian outback mythology with its images of vast stations, droving, skilled horse work, and dusty and laconic stockworkers would provide a solid basis for pastoralists to establish a legitimate place in the land. Certainly, it is an influential mythology and has a place in the cultural politics through which pastoral landscapes are maintained symbolically and materially. Outback mythology is, however, not a monolithic edifice. As to whether it alone can constitute a mythology adequate for the maintenance of pastoral landscapes among contemporary (post)colonial politics of land is more questionable. There are two ways in which this may be seen. First, is the adequacy of this conventional outback mythology in relation to how pastoralists see themselves. We should not assume that popular, dare I say urban, conceptions of outback lands and people, are consistent with identities and conceptions held by those who dwell within lands characterised as ‘outback’^[9] . We are familiar with this in relation to critiques of non-indigenous perceptions of indigenous people,^[10] but less so in relation to non-rural perceptions of rural, non-indigenous people. Pastoralists do not see their identity as wholly portrayed in the heroism of the conventional outback tale, they do not find their conception of their place in the land wholly provided for in such narratives.

Second, even as outback mythology celebrates the pastoral industry, it is also characterised by emptiness, wilderness and arguably, by settler transience in the face of a land that has not been transformed according to the mythical progression from wilderness to garden. In the conventional outback tale, the wilderness remains ever present. Without the transformative self-evidence of agriculture and the emergence of a ‘garden’ landscape, pastoralism remains either imaginatively or imminently absent and its roots in the land remain tenuous. As seen in the Native Title debates in 1996-98, many critics of pastoralists described pastoral lands in terms of vastness and emptiness, and suggested that pastoral leasehold tenure provided merely a readily removed veneer of occupation rather than a more deeply rooted presence.^[11] For pastoralists, then, imaginatively establishing permanence, persistence and presence has emerged as an important aspect of establishing legitimacy for their place on the land.