The concept of the frontier has been an enduring one over the course of European colonisation and settlement in Australia. In its classical form, it may be defined as an expanding boundary of conflict created in the process of colonial settlement and associated with coercive appropriation of land and landscape from its indigenous residents.^[1] In Northern Australia the frontier was contested comparatively recently under the guise of 19th century pastoralism, prospecting and missionisation. The impacts differed in character but the results were more or less the same. Writer Ernestine Hill, renowned for her heroic prose puts the issue succinctly;

As elsewhere, Aboriginal resistance to the appropriation of their land dissipated under the pressure of these dispersals, the ravages of disease and demographic decline. Pastoralism, by necessity, also held out the prospects of a ‘taming’ process whereby ‘wild or bush blackfellows’ were incorporated into pastoral settlements and mustering camps as ringers, cooks, sexual partners and dependents. Physical resistance tended to be sporadic, contained and ultimately, untenable.

A second order definition of the frontier in Australia, one which also has its counterparts in other colonised indigenous landscapes, is the notion of the frontier as a physical unknown or environmental wilderness.^[3] Reflecting on this idea Rose has commented that, ‘frontier mythology depends upon the creation of a vast emptiness in which the new nation forms itself’.^[4] In Australia the frontier was found at a conceptual level through the doctrine of terra nullius (i.e. land belonging to no one), and its supporting legislative apparatus, which denied and subsumed Aboriginal rights, and cultural identity. At the same time the ‘advancing’ frontier of colonial settlement also needed to actively create this perceptual fiction because of the uncomfortable reality of large numbers of resident Aboriginal populations all over the country. Proactive erasure of the Aboriginal presence was therefore also an inherently complicit component of the Australian nation building project and the image of an open unpeopled environment.

In some cases however, these emptied regions remained beyond or outside the subsequent settlement process. In other words, the frontier was ‘conquered’ and de-populated of its indigenous identity but it remained unsettled, undomesticated so to speak. This continuing emptiness of certain frontier regions has come to be viewed in terms of an environmental otherness, one that lies both physically and imaginatively beyond the familiar and settled social landscape. In other words the qualities of the empty frontier in contemporary Australia have been transformed and positively revalued in terms of environmental and conservation significance. Thus we arrive at the notion of the ‘untouched wilderness’ and the so-called pristine qualities of the remote and empty bush. Much of the present-day tourist industry in the Northern Territory is promoted on the basis of just these qualities on the northern frontier lands, popularly known as the ‘last frontier’ in Australia.^[5]

If the creation of the Australian ‘wilderness’ was in part a fiction of European frontier mythology, the actual Aboriginal depopulation and disappearance in many landscapes was an historical reality. In this process of Aboriginal de-population of traditional lands there is an inexorable loss and disintegration of generational knowledge and life experience about the constituent symbolic meanings of the land and its topographical features. From an Aboriginal perspective the absence of a continuing residential presence within a landscape and the increasing remoteness of ancestral experience and knowledge creates new kinds of alienation. It may become a dynamic boundary of separation between a contemporary Aboriginal experience of everyday life, and an increasingly distant ancestral knowledge; a distinction between the familiar and local on one hand and the remote and external on the other. In this context it might be argued that Aboriginal Australians can experience an emergent form of the frontier, one constituted as a frontier of knowledge and experience.

In her article, Rose has drawn a sharp contrast between the cultural perspectives of settler and indigenous society in relation to landscapes in northern Australia. She argues that ‘[t]he white people who have conquered this country find themselves in a liminal and paradoxical time-space (time zero), unlike the indigenous people for whom it is neither liminal nor paradoxical’.^[6] The experience of the Fitzmaurice River indigenes however is that the consequences of colonial settlement of Australia are less categorical and more ambiguous than this analysis suggests. Just as the character of contemporary Aboriginal society reflects the historical experience of colonial settlement, so relationships to ancestral landscapes have taken divergent paths. Caught up in the colonial processes that have transformed their societies and reordered residential practices, the relationship between contemporary and ancestral knowledge of Aboriginal place can become increasingly tenuous.

The great tidal Fitzmaurice River in western Northern Territory, exemplifies many of these attributes of frontier mythology and practice. My purpose in the following paper is to explore the changing values and historical perceptions of this classic frontier in the Northern Territory. I am concerned to map out some of the historical interactions and contemporary realities of indigenous and settler community (exdigenous)^[7] attempts alike to appropriate the landscape of the Fitzmaurice and convert it from the frontier to the familiar. I want to do so, however, from a particular perspective, one that arose out of a project to record and document Aboriginal toponyms and sacred sites on the Fitzmaurice River. This project developed over a number of years and coincided with a movement among affiliated Aboriginal communities to reinvigorate their historical and traditional ties with the Fitzmaurice, which had grown increasingly weaker in recent times.