Scratch an Aboriginal man long enough in the Fitzroy Valley region of the Kimberley and you will undoubtedly find he was or is a cowboy. Even those men who no longer are fit enough to handle the rigours of long hours of station work, will express their cowboy experience and pride in their dress: a large hat with upturned brim, press-stud shirt, blue jeans and riding boots. This gear says that he is able to handle himself in the saddle and with cattle, is conversant with a stoic work ethic, and likely he also has a cosmological knowledge and experience of land that cattle are moved across. For such an Aboriginal man his personal identification with land is entwined. It derives from the ability to physically survive in the land and ensure the good health of his cattle with a cosmological geography in which the physical environment manifests the actions of ancestral beings and their continual and ever-present palpability.^[23] The twining most often appears at water holes where those holding ancestral beings and exuding power are learnt of through song and ceremony. The knowledge of their whereabouts also allows a cowboy immersed in these traditions to guide cattle to them in times of drought. It is notable though that cattle are rarely accorded a place in that cosmological geography and the social correlation to this is that some young Aboriginal cowboys actively seek to identify their relationships to land as cowboys, rather than through the mythico-ritual aspects associated with initiation.

There is considerable variability amongst Aboriginal cowboys as to why this is the case. While no one person outlined to me the full range of reasons as to why station-based cowboys choose rodeo over initiation or participated in both, a number cited their own reasons that were shared by others. For some, rodeo offers the chance to meet female partners, foster friendships and through the rides display their competence as good stockmen. Attached to the latter capacity is the opportunity afforded by rodeos for young men to participate in highly visible, prestige-granting festivals that offer a land-based alternative to initiation ceremonies, cults and other collective ceremonial activities in which locality based knowledge and candidature is controlled by senior men or prompted by territorial organisation. This is particularly so for men who are residentially town and station based and find admission into that field of ritualistic activity complicated by their own parents’ or appropriate relatives’ lack of involvement in ceremonial or cult activities, issues of locality, and concerns of relatedness beyond the Aboriginal domain. This is not always the case though and some, who judged themselves suitable for candidature, stated that they just did not want to go through initiation, although they did not clearly articulate rodeo as the alternative ritualised domain. The most elaborate rejection of initiation candidature was expressed to me by a 19-year-old cowboy who said that despite his mother’s father being a senior custodian for the country his station leased and in a position to advance his candidature, he had no desire to go through the circumcision aspects of initiation as it amounted to an unwelcome violence being visited upon him. He did not clearly state that rodeo was a land-based alternative or a domain in which his identity could be publicly regarded, instead he narrated an alternative career path that envisaged rodeos and responsibility for land generated from cattle related activities. He planned a long-term career in rodeo, hoped that financial sponsorships, prize monies and monies earned as a station hand would sustain him for the foreseeable future and eventually saw himself inheriting the managerial responsibilities from his father for running the cattle station. Station managership was often mentioned by Aboriginal cowboys as a desirable personal goal but not as often as the almost universal aim, informally granted by others in the cattle community, of recognition as a ringer, a cowboy fully versed in cattle-based land knowledge and horse riding skills, an aim that was also shared by non-Aboriginal cowboys. It is in this context of personal recognition and prestige that rodeo participation can be regarded as producing social persons in a most public arena. As rodeos draw participants and spectators from across the Kimberley region they can also be said to produce a wider regional sociality based on egalitarian, non-residential principles between Aborigines and between Aborigines and non-Aboriginal persons resident in the region. From an Aboriginal perspective commensurate relations with non-Aboriginal stockmen and across the Aboriginal domain would be one outcome of Eric Kolig’s series of observations that changes in the religious life of the Kimberley region during the 1970s would result in increased egalitarianism within the religious community, individuation on the basis of personal assessment rather than classificatory positioning and expansive, non-localised connections forming the basis of ceremonial activity.^[24]

Many Aboriginal cattlemen refer to themselves in day-to-day conversation as ‘cowboys’, rather than ‘stockhands’, ‘stockworkers’ or ‘stockmen’. The compound ‘stock’ has historically been the self-reference of station workers’ choice throughout Australia, differentiated from the use of ‘cowboys’, which has a more populist or American inflection. The difference is more than country based though. Some of the flavour of this difference is evident in the work of Glen McLaren who emphasises technology as an indicator of competency amongst white northern Australian cattlemen as much as land-based skills.^[25] As the ‘stock’ compounds suggest, station-based labour is emphasised, where technical proficiency is summarised in an informal tradework designation. The use of the term ‘cowboy’ does not diminish the fundamental importance of competency with respect to land traversal and animal handling but it introduces a more self-conscious stylistic and performative sense to station work. Australian stockmen have certainly been aware of screen cowboys independent of television broadcast as American films were shown on stations at least as far back as the 1950s. The American actor John Wayne is still remembered fondly by older Aboriginal cowboys as they saw him pass across the station screen in the evenings in his cowboy guise. Indeed, the powerful depictions of stylishly dressed, gun-toting cowboys had an indelible effect on dress sense and resonated strongly with the use of force and guns on the Australian stations that Aborigines laboured on. Attention to style, an expression of a vigorous independent filmic masculinity, flowed from the screen into Aboriginal sensibilities. Alternate racial subjectivities and associations could be made in this imaginative space that offered more to race relations than the model of white mens’ capture and possession of Aborigines that Aboriginal stations workers laboured under. From the point of view of some Aboriginal men who worked on stations in the decades after the Second World War, film cowboys spoke to them about independence, power and vigour. Were they not also cowboys, as was John Wayne, did they not work for a boss, fight, drink, work together, chase women and drove as did their filmic companions? The critical eye that Cowlishaw knew to be cast on white bosses by Aborigines expanded to include commensurability with white men whether they were aware of it or not.^[26] Film did not alleviate the power of station bosses over station Aborigines but it did provide alternative imaginative spaces for expression by Aboriginal men. Knowing what it was that powerful independent white men wore meant that wearing a pair of recognisable riding boots or cowboy hat, or a particular style of clothing allowed for a vital, if small, reclamation of an integrity that was so often denied on stations.

More recently, the sensual immediacy of filmic social engagement has found renewed life through television. The ability to scrutinise film and television for its prompts to style has taken a new twist as many cowboys are aware that being a cowboy is itself an iconic exercise in a nation that has embedded pastoralism and the romantic traditions of stockwork deep within its national psyche. Their awareness of their public iconicity is exacerbated by the many documentaries, films, newspaper and magazine articles and photos that are produced about them and their lifestyle.^[27] The preponderance of such media is linked to the increased consumption of the cowboy as a commodity and a national figure that can be draped in fashion, itself tightly circumscribed amongst cowboys in terms of association with specific commercial brands. Rodeos are an important aspect of the circulation and exchange of commodity, representation and person, allowing as they do the creation of an audience (anywhere between 50 and 500 people at any given moment) comprised of industry regulars and others to witness the exchange. An unwritten rule of rodeos requires that contestants personally supply and wear appropriate dress, which does not mean safety clothing, but clothes that are recognisably cowboy clothes in pattern and cut.

To a large extent rodeos express station skills and the particular knowledge of cattle handling that mustering entails in a sporting dance between rider and beast. The bronc events mimic the breaking in of horses for the mustering season, the roping, bulldogging and campdraft events reproduce the separation of calves around the muster herd and the barrel races display an all-round horse riding proficiency. The only events that do not have a direct correlation to cattle and horse handling are the poddy, steer, bull and bullock rides. On the property they may be ridden for fun but there is nothing gained from riding a bovine. Nevertheless, riding on the back of a bull in a Kimberley rodeo usually denotes that the competitor works on a station, because the general skills needed to do so are often only acquired by working with cattle and horses on stations. Competitors in Kimberley rodeos come in off the stations to the towns and often are announced to the onlooking crowd by personal name and station affiliation. The latter is immensely important and announces an association to the activities of that station and the land it encompasses, Aboriginal or otherwise. It is rare for an Aboriginal competitor or onlooker to express an identity that is not station related. The only time I saw otherwise was when the Aboriginal station hands of the Mt Pierre station, Gooniyandi country, wore a padded vest with a Rainbow Snake painted along the spine every time they competed in an event. Even then the snake was crested by the name of a cattle-trucking company, so that the two associations with land lay across their backs. These symbolic expressions of identity show that Aboriginal cowboys are not readily amenable to the dominance of nature argument that Lawrence^[28] holds, which uncritically assigns whiteness as the racial identity of the rider. Indeed, as I will show, this inconsistency about symbolic categories also applies for beasts, but for quite different reasons.

Despite the dangers involved, all of the crisis events are expressed by riders as a playful contest with chance: ‘too much fun’, as one cowboy running to the fence after being thrown sky-high by a bull, shouted out at the Broome crowd. But as to dominance, that is less clear. Indeed, to ride a horse or bull successfully, the rider must give themselves up to extreme velocities in the steep, jerking, manic movements of the animal. There is no pretence of affect before the onlooking eyes, only the solitary becoming with the beast: to blend the edges of the body, to freely dissolve the surfaces of beast and man, to find a series of moments amongst incredible speeds and forces when one’s centre of gravity is a point and not a weight to be repudiated by the animal. It is constantly said by all riders that successfully riding a bucking beast is about a state of mind (calmness and clarity) and a physical concurrence with the beast so that, ‘There is a reality of becoming-animal, even though one does not in reality become animal’.^[29]

That other supposed aspect of nature in the frontier, the beast, is also shown to be more than the function it has been assigned; that of a vigorous masculine wildness to be tamed. This is because all bovine in rodeos are wards of capital and to a certain extent, the state. In the system of capital to which they belong, their value is monetary as their identity is primarily assessed in terms of cash for weight units (kilograms). They are continuously classified with characteristics pertaining to this system by the state as it seeks to tailor their growth to market forces. At the beginning of each calendar year, Department of Agriculture officials advise station owners to produce bovine with particular characteristics: meat with distinct marbling qualities; to breed cattle with single colour skins; encourage weight types; to remove horns and to regulate teeth numbers. They are told each year new characteristics to promote or avoid in congruence with market expectations and are given regular updates through widely distributed departmental newsletters (Kimberley Pastoral Memo). Far from the beast being a wild animal, it is already produced by the twins of capital and the state the moment it enters the rodeo ring. Remember Aaron and Quentin’s complaint about the torpidity of the bulls. This was because they had been mustered for sale and had been waiting for a few days in uncovered yards for a truck to remove them, not because it was their natural state in rodeos. In my abstractions, this repudiates the distinctions needed between non-Aboriginal and bovine in order to generate the conditions for taming as both are, in symbolic terms, expressive of far more than civil society and wilderness. This situation would seem less an issue of the dominance of one over the other, than the both expressing different aspects of money, state and nation.

At a symbolic level then we see that Aborigines and animals frustrate the place assigned to them in frontier theory. While the masculine and sexual associations in rodeo are undiminished in Aboriginal rodeo, Aboriginal participation in and organisation of rodeos display a mélange of expressions beyond dominance. At a political level, Aboriginal-organised rodeos show how important Aboriginal people are to regional society in general and the cattle industry in particular. This is congruent with what Liz Furniss^[30] has said regarding Canadian Rodeos where Canadian Indians organised cultural displays to raise the profile of Indians in Canadian regional society. In the Kimberley, Aboriginal rodeos strategically display cattle competence and knowledge of the land that is comparable to their non-Aboriginal neighbours and challenge the racism and pessimistic stereotypes of Aboriginality that are still common there. Also, I argue there is a subterranean knowledge of land displayed by Aborigines in rodeos that is never openly mentioned in rodeo grounds but is often talked on outside of the arena. The landscape for all Kimberley Aborigines, whether within the ceremonial tradition or not, is imbued with a personal, collective and cosmological history that very few non-Aborigines can claim. In this experience of the land, personal movement is oriented by ‘…ways of talking, seeing, of knowing, and a set of practices …’.^[31] This experience maps totemic ancestral presence in the landscape as both enduring and negotiable.^[32] As one Aboriginal station manager said to me, ‘I will always listen to the advice of the oldfellas for this country when I am working out where to put a bore. They know the land because they have walked it, not like these consultants, they don’t know the land, the way the water flows under the ground’. The walking he refers to is the walking done during the wet months after the cattle season was over and people visited each other, went to sacred sites and gathered for ceremony. An even clearer account of the dual experiences of land an Aboriginal cowboy can have is expressed by Morndi Munro.^[33] When he recounts his entrance onto the earth he describes it in two different ways. In one account he says, ‘My name is Morndi, it’s a saltwater name in Ungummi and Worrora. I’m just about saltwater myself. I’m Morndi, the saltwater mirage. I came to my father as a vision. He caught sight of me out of the corner of his eye’. In the second account he says: ‘I was born raw in the bush at Hawkestone Peak, in the cattle yards between Kimberley Downs and Napier. Right in the middle of those two stations. My bush name is Morndi and my whiteman name is Billy Munro’.^[34] The different place names and conception stimulant, in both accounts, suggest a dual consciousness of orientation to place that registers Morndi as the outcome of two creative fields of agency, a process Alan Rumsey,^[35] Francesca Merlan,^[36] Jeremy Beckett^[37] and Deborah Bird Rose,^[38] amongst others, have noted in other locations across Aboriginal Australia. In Morndi’s case his articulation of two different aspects of identity based on distinctive and conjoined social references generates modes of articulation and relatedness across Aboriginal and pastoral domains that looks for simultaneous identification, although it could well lend itself to a blended and possibly hybrid formulation in the intentional and agentive sense Homi Bhabha grants the term.^[39]

To return to Broome and the two Aboriginal men, Aaron and Quentin, I shared company with on our drive to Koongie Park. As I said, they were not amongst the placegetters there but Aboriginal men were first and third in the bull ride and first in the other roughstock events. Indeed in the five rodeos held throughout 1999 in the Kimberley, Aboriginal men won the crisis events and took out the overall cowboy award at each rodeo. If rodeos play out themes about the relationship between settler-colonists, Aborigines and the environment implicit in the constitution of nationhood then far from rodeos recreating the settler-colonist taming of the wild, Aboriginal participation in and organistion of rodeos in the Kimberley performatively express an Aboriginal repossession of the nation.