Table of Contents
One Sunday late in August 1999 I was in a car travelling to Koongie Park station, just outside of Halls Creek in the Kimberley, with Quentin and Aaron, two Aboriginal cowboys just finished competing at the Broome Rodeo. They had not won a buckle or taken home a cheque, but they were, despite a couple of misgivings, reasonably happy with their participation in the bull-ride, one of the three, with saddle bronc riding and bareback bronc riding, basic rough stock events at any rodeo. One of their reservations concerned the quality of the stock, both the bulls and the bucking horses, as they did not buck high or fast enough for their liking. They also regarded the judges as less than impartial in their scoring, giving out point scores that were sometimes hard to fathom.
In their opinion the judges showed a partiality towards contestants based on station affiliation. That is, they felt the non-Aboriginal judges favoured riders who worked on particular stations over other riders. This was a criticism of judges that cropped up at most rodeos but at this particular rodeo there was also the accusation made by some Aboriginal onlookers that a particularly good bull-ride by a young Aboriginal boy was not recognised in the score he was awarded. A subsequent ride by a non-Aboriginal cowboy from another station was awarded higher points from the judges and it was felt by some that judging consistency was not maintained between the two riders. Quentin and Aaron put the inconsistent scoring down to the judges favouring contestants from particular stations and firmly rejected my suggestion that race was an issue, but other Aboriginal people felt that it was a clear matter of racial prejudice. One Aboriginal woman succinctly expressed her frustration at the perceived prejudice when she said that the next time that he rode, ‘we should make him white’, to ensure impartiality in the point scoring. In contrast her Aboriginal husband said that the non-Aboriginal rider had mastered a particularly difficult set of manoeuvers by the bull and deserved his high points.
While there was disagreement about the points awarded to different riders in Broome, it was similar sentiments expressed by this Aboriginal couple that led them to organise a rodeo in 1992 in the town of Fitzroy Crossing that was unique in Kimberley rodeo history. In this rodeo the participants, organisers and judges were exclusively Aboriginal, the first Kimberley rodeo to exclude non-Aborigines. As the principal organiser told me, his staging of this rodeo allowed the Aboriginal contestants the freedom to compete without the scoring bias that they regarded as being so prevalent in previous non-Aboriginal organised and judged rodeos. Rodeos had been an annual event since the mid-1960s in the Kimberley, but none had been organised by Aborigines or held on their stations. Prior to this time, rodeos were not an organised event in their own right in the Kimberley, although rodeo events occurred in race meets around the region, the most well known occurring at the Negri River during the 1940s and 1950s and organised by the Vesteys firm. So, some 30 years after the first independent rodeo in the Kimberley, the situation was reversed, not because the organisers did not like white people or regard them as tainting the sanctity of their rodeo, but simply so that they could compete amongst themselves and be assured that they would receive equitable scores. The following year, 1993, the same Aboriginal man organised an open rodeo, but this time held it in yards on the Aboriginal-owned station that he manages. He has not organised a rodeo since that time, but it is now commonplace for one rodeo a year to be organised by Aborigines in either Broome, Fitzroy Crossing, Halls Creek or Kununnurra, which together comprise the yearly rodeo circuit in the Kimberley.
On the face of it this situation looks no more than Aboriginal people struggling to have their presence felt in an event that they have participated in for many years, but had little say in. However, there are two specific features of Aboriginal organised rodeos and Aboriginal participation in rodeos that reveal more consequential aspects of this struggle. The first feature is that the participation in, and particularly organisation of, rodeos by Aborigines reflects the rapidly changing place of Aborigines within the Kimberley pastoral industry. The organisers of rodeos in the Kimberley are almost always those who own and manage stations or are involved in the service sector of the beef industry. Unlike the large American and Canadian rodeos written about by Frederick Errington and Elizabeth Furniss, Kimberley rodeos are highly localised affairs and rarely draw contestants, spectators, or sponsors outside of the Kimberley. Local stations provide the horses, cattle and rodeo labourers such as chute bosses, judges and clowns and no Kimberley rodeo committee registers rodeo results with any of the regional or national governing bodies for professional rodeo.[1] Station organisers value their independence too highly to submit themselves to the regulations these organisations require, so have nurtured their own regional rodeo circuit independent of the central Australian, eastern and western state circuits. Since the first purchase of four stations in 1976 for traditional owners, there has been a rapid increase of Aboriginal-owned stations in the Kimberley. Today there are 26 Aboriginal-owned stations with a further three in the process of being handed over to the traditional owners. This is slightly more than 28% of all Kimberley pastoral leases which effectively places grazing rights, pastoral designated lands and cattle in their hands for the first time since sheep and cattle entered the Kimberley in the 1880s at the hands of Queenslander pastoralists.[2] If the frontier in the Kimberley has been largely defined by a century of pastoralists taking Aboriginal lands and utilising cheap and at times, slave Aboriginal labour, then the current state of affairs with regards to lease-land ownership represents a shift in frontier relations.[3]
The second aspect of Aboriginal rodeos that is worth highlighting is the challenge that Aborigines and rodeos make to general tenets of frontier theory, that biography of settler-colonial nations that enlists the environment and indigenes to the historical project of defining a distinctive national ethos. The frontier thesis offers an interpretation of national genesis and development in which Aborigines are usually posited as being subject to the violence of colonisation, itself an object and process in Australia that provides for a pragmatic and energetic national character to emerge. Further, rodeo has generally been interpreted as performatively expressing the importance of the frontier of colonisation to the development of nationhood.[4] As a historiographical interpretation of colonialism, the frontier is generally defined by the distinctive causative roles granted to the environment and indigenes. Their generative status derives from the consistent interpretation of a defining ‘otherness’ that is attached to them in frontier analysis, not in their particular distinctiveness, which could conceivably contribute to different national scenarios. To make only one international comparison of environments – the celebrated chronicler of American settler history, Frederick Jackson Turner regarded the open and empty expanses of American wilderness as contributing to self-reliance, restless individualism and the distinctiveness of New World democratic ideals.[5] By contrast, across a number of genres the Australian environment, as bush, outback and desert, revealed itself to contribute not only to the conditions for the development of laconic, anti-authoritarian virtues in white male pioneers, the local equivalent of Turner’s frontiersman, but also a more somber, tragic timbre to national culture.[6] In both historical cases though, the wild, anti-civilised status of the environment and indigenes are often regarded as providing the flashpoints by which the nation can define itself, implicating them as the compulsory other in the process of civilising, racialising and gendering a continually emergent nation as well as idealising them as the necessary sources for national crises. To restate this in more succinct terms, the frontier conceptually links the environment and indigenes to the nation through the tense medium of crisis. The most noticeable feature of this ideology is that the undifferentiated nature of indigenous peoples and the environment allows for a mutable national identity to develop. It is at this point that I wish to suggest that Aboriginal rodeos and contestants call into question the validity of locating mutability with the nation, while immutability resides in Aborigines.
In her discussion of the schools of Old and New Western History in American historical scholarship, Furniss (this volume) notes that both the analytic and descriptive uses of the term ‘frontier’ are so varied as to make any integrative theory about it almost impossible. Further, following Patricia Limerick’s[7] and Richard Slotkin’s[8] critique of the ethnocentric bias of frontier theory, frontier scholars ignorance of other critical factors in settlement, and its own status as triumphalist myth, there is considerable difficulty in using any notion of the frontier to discuss the relationships between power, settlement and invasion. Limerick’s trenchant critique takes aim at the triumphalist nationalism assigned to racial conflict in the Turnerian thesis. Turner’s reflections on the American frontier, which dominated interpretations of American history for the first half of last century and has been influential in the analysis of other national histories in liberal democracies despite its embodiment of a particular type of American progressivist ideology, used the geographical and racial frontier to define ‘national self-consciousness’.[9] As ‘an unsubtle concept in a subtle world’[10] Limerick regards it at once too monolithic, ethnocentric, racist and masculinist to be usefully employed. However, amongst American as well as Australian scholars, the conceptual flexibility of the term has led to alternative conceptions of the frontier imagination than dispossession, that describe cultural boundaries, intercultural processes, interlocking practices, and the formation of subjects in their relations to each other.[11] Some of these developments continued aspects of the Turner thesis while others introduced new ideas about the asymmetrical relations of power operating between social groups as well as introducing concepts of culture into the analysis of frontiers. As Kerwin Klein has noted, anthropological uses of culture, at least in a relativistic sense, are not synonymous with the social evolutionist ideas of social groups that were common in Turner’s day and so the meanings and usages of the frontier tend to be different when different theoretical tools are applied.[12] The multiple uses of the frontier led Limerick to reluctantly accept its continuing usage even if she continued to object to the placement of celebratory conquest at the heart of defining nationhood and civil society.
I want to continue this revisionist strain and return to the notion of the primitive that Turner developed, especially with regard to the question of its importance to defining the distinctiveness of settler-colonisers and nationhood in general. I wish to suggest that notwithstanding their transformation as political subjects from natives to original citizens, as Beckett describes it,[13] in terms of a frontier imagination Australia’s indigenous peoples continue to be defined against settlers and are critical to creating a settler identity. Here, I think, the weight Turner gave to the colonised in defining the frontier is worth considering. Mark Bassin elucidates the character of Turner’s quest for a defining national story as one which draws on 19th century European ideas of scientific history, in which society is regarded as an evolving organism.[14] Social development, in Turner’s thinking, was predicated on a struggle with wildness and its peculiar features in any particular geographic and territorial setting. Nature consisted of, broadly speaking, environment and indigenous, both characteristically wild, in the sense of ‘…awaiting discovery, and that it would be the antidote for the poisons of industrial society’.[15] Where human society (which excluded indigenous peoples) interacted with nature was the frontier, and the character of that interaction defined the settler nation’s central characteristics. By constantly testing the margins of what constitutes national character it reinforces those very attributes that are regarded as central such as institutions (jural), political types (democracy) and characteristics (entrepreneurial individuality). The frontier is also, said Turner, that place away from the central communities of national life where settler society returns to be reborn and renewed. There at the frontier, resides the primitive, immutable and constant, to provide the conditions by which the character of the nation might recreate itself before it succumbs to the hubris of civilised life. In regards to this process in America he says,
American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnishes the forces dominating American character.[16]
The primitive, the nation’s indigenous companion, is the antithesis of civil order. It is both the conditions of wilderness and the primitive condition, ‘our untamed selves … in tune with nature’,[17] an empty expanse and a presence to be subjugated. Where the environment is concerned there is recognition by Turner that it undergoes transformation as it is subject to the frontiersman’s developmental urges. By contrast, Turner never imagines the indigenous as being affected by its interactions with the settler nation except in a deleterious sense. Neither its violence, nor its subtle promptings invigorates positive change there. In Turner’s recapitulationist frame of thinking, a return to barbarism brings about individual and social rebirth and a consciousness of the progress modern man has taken from indigenous hunter to urban manufacturer.[18] All of these types are expressive of increasing social complexity, but at the moment the ideology of the natural development of social complexity reaches its apex, it is in crisis. Without recourse to the earliest mode of social being, which is predicated on direct and unimpeded reliance on the environment, the nation is in danger of losing itself. In a colourful passage from his original 1893 lecture, Turner describes the decivilising process:
The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilisation and arrays him in the hunting shirt and moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iriquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails.[19]
In this moral economy of a continually beginning nation, the frontier defines necessary and ongoing crises. Paradoxically, these crises are predicated on a struggle (‘its continuous touch’) with the wilderness and the Aboriginal, both fabricated as interior peripheries. The causative logic that bound these components of settler nation-building rested on the maintenance of fundamental differences between settler-colonists, indigenous inhabitants and the environment in which there is transfer of creative energy from indigene and environment to settler-colonist. The frontier is that discourse, that active struggle, which does not recede as long as the settler nation consists of a set of relationships and principles that are predicated on the ever-continual transfer of those energies.
Bassin, Mark 1933,'Turner, Solov'ev, and the 'Frontier Hypothesis': the Nationalist Significance of Open Spaces', Journal of Modern History, 65 (3), pp. 473–511.
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