One of the questions raised by these accounts is whether the relationship between settler pastoralists and land is comparable to that of Aboriginal people. On the face of it pastoral relationships based on a sense of ancestral origins and on permeability between land and people appear similar to Aboriginal relationships to land. This topic requires more elaboration than possible within the task tackled here. Suffice here to say that there appear to be some fundamental differences, in particular that the pastoral sense of connection appears to be a process of becoming connected, whereas for Aboriginal people it is always a question of being. Moreover, pastoral relationships, based as they are in labour and reproduction, may be recreated in different places. Aboriginal relationships, though far from static, are not so readily transported and recreated.

This chapter has focused on selected elements of pastoral memory and histories. I have sought to lay out those elements that illustrate pastoralists’ conceptions of landscape evolution in Central Australia, and which validate their habitation and land use. Although the histories present these elements as self evident in their worth, their underlying strength derives from two broader structural features of the narratives.

One pertains to Raymond Williams’s concept of the ‘knowable community’^[47].This is a ‘strategy in discourse’^[48] through which value is bestowed on certain and powerful sections of society, such that those sections, their members, their activities and their values stand as definitive of society as a whole. The ‘knowable community’, as presented in any one narrative is a community ‘wholly known, within the essential terms’ of the narrative, yet as an ‘actual community [it is] very precisely selective’.^[49] The appearance of wholeness emplaced and built in emptiness, as we see in pastoral histories, conceals selectivity and fragmentation. In addition, the land itself is drawn into the pastoral ‘knowable community’ as its capacities and variations are woven into pastoral concepts of productivity, persistence and faith that naturalise the pastoral presence. The pastoral mode of knowing the land becomes the ‘good of Central Australia’.

The second structuring feature is further buried within the stories told. This is a feature alluded to at points in the text, the mythic landscape progressions from wilderness to cultivated garden. In times of European expansionism these idealised and strongly hierarchical geographies were mapped onto the globe, positioning Europe as civilised and the colonies as wilderness. By the late 19th century such geographies came to be mapped in nationalist terms onto European colonies.^[50] As European nations expanded their empires, these ancient ideals ‘functioned as ideology and legitimation for settlement of the New World’.^[51]

The wilderness landscape is essentially unformed, chaotic, innocent and uninhabited. Classically, the garden is a step towards culture. It is the crucible of domestic life and the active transformation of the earth for human ends, and is a place of labour within nature’s cycles. In classical mythology, it is superseded by the city, the pinnacle of culture, itself to be returned to wilderness as it degenerates. By the colonising period, however, the garden had become an endpoint in itself as the classical cycle of landscape destruction and creation was replaced by a linear progression from wilderness to the recovery of the garden from the Fall.^[52] In relation to colonising practices, recovering the garden landscape involved emptying the landscape of indigenes and establishing agriculture and reciprocal relations with land.

In their representations of the construction of Central Australia, the pastoral histories replicate the creation of the garden from an empty wilderness. Upon these potent ideals they build a version of yeoman agrarianism that includes reciprocal relationships between settler and land in territory unmodified by the plough. Pastoralists tell a story of closing the frontier, but one that freezes the landscape just after closure, does not countenance change and celebrates frontier activities. They tell of a process of settlement but rather than seeing this as something that can evolve and go on, pastoral settlement brings closure. Although pastoralists bring and carry out change, they see this as teleological process; the pastoral landscape is an endpoint. That their changes and their labour, are themselves part of broader social processes that vary regionally, nationally, globally and in time, is disavowed. History ends with them. In pastoral histories and memory, all value, as a ‘general… condition’,^[53] is to be found in the past. Even as the frontier is ended in these histories, it is made available for retelling as a model of society and landscape for today.

In these retrospective responses to change, pastoralists derive their morality from the very colonising structures that are under challenge. They look to a simplified past for guidance, rather than fully responding to the complexities of the present. They draw on a highly selective recollection of the past that is not simply an outcome of colonialism but is constructed from the very mythical foundations that have informed, driven and justified non-indigenous settlement of Australia and the dispossession of indigenous people. These histories portray their protagonists one-dimensionally as deserving ‘battlers’. Until more complex pasts are admitted within the dominant ‘whitefella’ culture of the NT, however, these histories simply give further voice to a group that still wields considerable political and cultural power.