In the pastoral histories such as those listed above, the arrival by pastoral families in Central Australia constitutes a key moment in delineating a past that is gone and a present that is about to unfold. The story of a land without history, a tabula rasa upon which the settlers could create not only a new nation, but also fresh lives and new starts for themselves in a youthful landscape unwearied by humanity is an old one in Australian historiography.[21] The currency and continued publication of histories that reiterate this theme indicate that it is one that is not necessarily losing its vigour. The journeys to Central Australia by early pastoral families such as the Nickers, Price and Chalmers[22] feature significantly in pastoral historical narratives.
These three families were coming to Central Australia after problems and losses elsewhere. Central Australia represented a new start. For example, the Nicker family came to the Centre and saved for years to buy a station in order to ‘leave behind their former lives and start again beyond the boundaries of what they had individually experienced’.[23] Initially the land tests these families, throwing up unfamiliar landscapes, aridity and seemingly impenetrable mountain ranges. Ultimately, however, the land softens in the accounts, and becomes welcoming and full of potential. The station envisaged by these families seems to only require labour to assume their full but quiescent form.
In the published accounts, the arrival of these families at the sites of their future homesteads is portrayed as much homecoming as arrival. After saving for eleven years, the Nicker family is able to purchase Ryans Well station. Their arrival there is a transition from harshness to verdant bucolism:
Yesterday they had trailed across a spinifex plain, relieved by sparse grey shrubbery and this morning everything had changed. They’d wound across a creek-bed in a gap in the Hann Ranges where pine trees sprinkled the hillsides and gums nodded in the early morning breeze. Bloodwoods harboured flights of brilliantly-green budgerigars and cockatoos prattled raucously as they wheeled and dipped.
Past the gap, they came into a wide, shallow valley where shadows dappled their road and softer grasses and herbage grew more abundantly. The fierce spinifex lay behind them was restrained from entering or infringing by the stolid demarcation of the Hann Hills[24]
From the Nicker’s first camp at the future site of their homestead, Robinson paints a picture of a family at home and at peace in this landscape: ‘there weren’t any walls to surround them but they were home’.[25] This arrival is also represented as a new beginning, of activity and life not known by this landscape:
An owl ‘whoo-d enquiringly at all the unaccustomed activity and who could doubt his question because rarely had there been such movement, so many people, animal and sounds within his knowledge. He settled himself on a branch of a mulga tree and absorbed these new sights, swivelling his head now and then towards a new sound. The fire’s glow mesmerised him. It was beyond his ken.[26]
The fundamental story being told in these accounts of arrival is of the discovery of a pastoral landscape. The pastoral landscape does not have to be created; it already exists. It exists in an unformed state, and requires only labour to bring out its full potential and to make it a place for family life. In effect, the ‘arrival tales’ in these pastoralist accounts begin the pastoral story of a process that went on for many years, and which through labour, revealed the envisaged stations much as a sculptor reveals the sculpture within the stone. It is also a landscape that is largely empty of Aboriginal people. Those who are present are generally those who become ‘trusted companions’ and childminders. They are, except in Ford’s[27] account that emphasises benign paternalism on the part of pastoralists, presented as isolated and alienated figures, rather than as coherent groups of landowning people. Consistent with the portrayal of a virginal land, the pastoral histories do not generally canvas the possibility of settler-caused Aboriginal dispersal and fragmentation prior to the arrival of the settler protagonists.
The new day dawning in such accounts involved transforming this welcoming but ‘untouched’ landscape into a home. The welcoming nature of the places which were to become homestead sites and centres of family life stands in stark contrast to stories of struggle, sacrifice and loss that also pervade pastoral narratives. The apparent poles of welcome and struggle are not, however, incompatible in the pastoral story. Both are important constituents of it and together tell a story of a land that, in pastoral culture, is harsh and often fickle, but which is fundamentally productive and which rewards faith in its capacity to support those who stay and learn its ways.
Indeed at this early stage some key elements of the pastoral story of Central Australia are emerging. In the accounts, the families are forced to engage with the land early on, mentally and physically, to reach their destinations and the possibilities, harshness notwithstanding, they still envision. The qualities of endurance and patience in the face of the land’s enormity and implacability are highlighted. This quality, to become a key element in pastoral relationships to land, is seen not only in the families’ continued faith in what lay ahead but also in their dogged acceptance of the trials imposed by the cycles of flood and drought. As pastoralists would see it, this is the beginning of an acceptance of the hardships of Cental Australia. For pastoralists, this acceptance brings a morality to their presence in the country. In the pastoral histories, the land enfolds and engulfs the pastoralists. Pastoralists use and extract from the land, but are ultimately unable to significantly transform it as the spatial and temporal enormity of the land overshadows them, yet simultaneously shapes and sustains them, rewarding their persistence. In Central Australian cattle culture, the persistence is significant in setting pastoralists apart from others and in claiming a legitimate and righteous presence. That the land rewards faith and persistence is illustrated in these accounts most clearly by events in the years following arrival.