Unlike the bounteous grasslands of the central Victoria River District which, in the space of a few short years, became subject to the proliferation of pastoral establishments, the Fitzmaurice River basin held little attraction for pastoralism. Difficulties of terrain, poor grazing potential and access problems meant that the river always lay on the margins of pastoral settlement and never attracted significant settler interest. This remains the situation into the present day where the Fitzmaurice River region lies largely beyond settled society and continues to exhibit a range of enduring qualities of liminality or transition. While the overt violence of the river frontier receded, many of the qualities that characterised frontier perceptions of the river persist in a variety of ways. This can be understood from the perspective of both settler and indigenous society alike.

Ecologically speaking, the river defines the changeover between the wetter, more heavily forested, swamp country of the Moil and Daly Rivers to the north, and the drier open savannah lands of the Victoria River District in the south. This ecological distinction contributed to the development of social differences between Aboriginal communities. The ‘cowboy’ culture, with its social origins in the mustering camps of the cattle stations contrasts with the mission culture that developed north of the river around Port Keats and the Daly River.^[32] The latter experienced an entirely different history of religious-based discipline and orientation. The distinction persists to this day despite increasing interaction between the respective communities.

These distinctions between Aboriginal communities separated by the river, however, have much earlier origins. In traditional and historical terms for example the river marked the limits of the subsection naming system, the skin system, that extends throughout the Victoria River District. It also formed the northern extent of ritual subincision practices with their attendant ceremonial and ritual support structures.^[33] Contemporary myths support this conclusion. All told it seems that in times past the river may well have formed a long-standing social barrier or filter that constrained the extent of direct communication. Stanner, for instance commented on the apparent recent adoption of the subsection and ngurlu^[34] naming system among the Murrinhpatha people. ‘Both [he noted] have undoubtedly spread from the Djamindjung to the Murinbatha, perhaps in the last twenty years’.^[35] Given the likely strong pre-colonial history of the subsection naming system in the region, the recent adoption by the Murrinhpatha suggests a shift in the nature of ritual communication between the neighbouring communities, possibly as an inadvertent effect of colonial intervention.

From a somewhat different contemporary perspective, the 1996 acquisition by the Australian army of the Bradshaw Pastoral Lease which extends to the southern edges of the Fitzmaurice River, represents a modern and rather ironic expression of the river frontier within Aboriginal Australia. On the northern banks of the Fitzmaurice River is the expansive Aboriginal freehold territory of the Daly River Land Trust. Thus the tidal flow of the river, demarcates a new and enduring legal and cultural boundary between Aboriginal land on one side and army or federal state land on the other.

In this context of multiple boundaries and transit points, which coalesce on the river, we can recognize something of the continuing expression of the colonial frontier in the contemporary world. But it is one in which the frontier experience has different consequences for Aboriginal and settler society alike.

From a settler perspective it is the ‘pristine wilderness’ quality of the river that conveys the frontier character and persists into the present. This conception is well demonstrated in one of the distinctive features of the construction of frontier landscapes, namely its representation in cartography.

The business of map-making might be described as one of those classic handmaidens of colonialism.^[36] The construction of maps and more particularly the appropriation of new topography and named landscapes through the creation of toponyms form a primary vehicle for asserting hegemonic ownership over land. It represents the cartographic equivalent of the erasure of indigenous identity in land and its replacement by more ‘familiar’ European referent points and orientations. Indeed, it might be said that the very process of map-making itself in the development and expansion of colonial settlement served to effect a transformation of the ‘wild’ and unknown frontier into a domesticated space, remade into a familiar landscape.

In this process Aboriginal toponyms and cognitive or iconic maps of places within landscapes^[37] are simultaneously erased, subsumed, or converted into the language of the dominant nomenclature. Hence the contemporary maps of northern Australia are replete with evidence of the naming process of colonial settlement. Regional toponyms such as the Victoria River itself, the Pinketon Ranges, Blackfella Creek, Massacre Creek as well as all the Sandy Creeks, Lilly Waterholes, Top Yards and so on, all represent the historical legacy of this cultural appropriation of landscape.

At the same time, and by contrast, one of the striking features of the Fitzmaurice river basin is the comparative absence or paucity of named topographical features on current map sheets of the region. This vast riverine landscape boasts just a handful of European names mapped onto the country. Most of these derive from the 1839 maritime visit of Stokes and Wickham on the Beagle and are focused to a significant degree on the major riverine features of the area. They include names such as Keyling Inlet, Quoin and Clump island, and the Fitzmaurice River itself. The few other official place names generally derive from Aboriginal terms and for the most part are erroneously located on the maps.

Now, the absence of named places is not an uncommon feature in Northern Territory mapping and there are numerous map sheets for example, which are largely devoid of any named topographical features (see Australian Topographic Map Survey series). For the most part, however, these official maps reflect landscapes that exhibit relatively minor topographical variation. The regularity of the sand deserts, the stone plateau country and the contiguous single-species eucalypt scrub are examples.

The Fitzmaurice River, on the other hand, is a region of rich topographical diversity and landscape variation. It has multiple islands, inlets, waterholes, rock bars, cliffs, waterfalls, rivers, creeks, mountain ranges and so on, virtually none of which carries a European toponym. In other words, from an exdigenous (settler) perspective the river and its environs might be said to constitute an unnamed land, a terra innomena, that speaks to the ineffective or stalled appropriation and resolution of the river frontier. In other words, settler society resolved the opposition of the indigenous river population by absorbing it into pastoral and mission society but it failed to fully incorporate or domesticate the ‘wild’ river environment into the ‘settled’ world. In these terms the river remains an empty frontier, rarely visited, unmodified and cast imaginatively as a wilderness. Even for the rangelands which lie within the Fitzmaurice River basin and which operate on informal pastoral maps with their top paddocks, bores and yards, there is no extension of this nomenclature into the river environment proper.

This great sense of the ‘emptiness’ of the Fitzmaurice River, I would argue, is not simply a construction expressed in and by the symbolism of settler society. In many ways it is also a social reality for many members of contemporary Aboriginal communities and families who represent the present traditional owners of country within the Fitzmaurice River basin. Their distance and separation from the river began with the early and inexorable long-term demographic decline of local Aboriginal resident populations on the river.

Accompanying the physical absence of the indigenous presence was a corresponding decline in traditional patterns and knowledge of nomadic life and a weakening of meaningful ties to Fitzmaurice River estates. For young members of these communities the Fitzmaurice has become, over time, a newly mythologised and remote ancestral space. Barber describes this generation shift of population and settlement especially after the Second World War and into recent times in the following terms:

In other words, for many Aborigines with traditional affiliations to the area, the sense of ancestral belonging to the river is tempered, even detached from everyday social reality through its remoteness from present-day settlements. In the decline of personal lived knowledge of the land and its traditional places, and the disappearance of the ‘old people’ who walked its paths and spoke its language, I would argue that the Fitzmaurice might also be seen as an emergent Aboriginal frontier. No wilderness to be sure, but as a known environment of Aboriginal significance, the river echoes absences as much as it does the presence of Aboriginal history and residence. It is the ‘absent’ presence of a once thriving riverine culture that abandoned the relative security and familiarity of the river and voluntarily entered the world of the missions and mining camps to the north and the mustering stock camps to the south. In this context, concepts of liminality and absence in relation to Aboriginal home countries become an imagined reality for a growing community of younger affiliated members to the Fitzmaurice.

The notion that there could be an Aboriginal frontier, is perhaps stretching the definition and sense of the term from its more classical meaning. But frontiers are rarely clearly demarcated, and similarly the subjective experience of frontier realities varies markedly between individuals. In this sense my point is made more heuristically, and serves to highlight the complex impact of colonialism on Aboriginal lives. Mission and town life and its focus on settlement and sedentary living have greatly contributed to a growing sense of separation and detachment from traditional lands. Apart from the physical separation of Aboriginal people from ancestral lands for extended periods, social activity became increasingly focused on the sedentary world of housing complexes and fixed communities. Welfare dependency, the disabling effects of unemployment and drug abuse of various kinds, combined with a marked enthusiasm, especially among younger Aborigines, for European consumer goods and commodities, all contributed to a turning away from ancestral pathways.

It is fortunate then that at the very moment, historically speaking, when the links between ancestral country and contemporary life were at their weakest, there emerged processes of reclamation by those among the Aboriginal community whose ties to country remained grounded in personal experience. In this case, it was the select groups of older Aborigines whose youth was spent camping, foraging and hunting within the riverine environment.

The possibility of renewing ties to the Fitzmaurice was to some extent a reflection of broader trends in Aboriginal aspirations in northern Australia for a return to country. The emergence of the out-station movement and the possibilities offered by land rights and native title legislation generated a renewed interest in reasserting land-based identities.

More particularly, however, one significant development in the nascent revitalisation of Aboriginal ties to the Fitzmaurice River, was the opening up of an access track in the early 1990s to the ‘Bele’ (Majalindi valley)^[39] for mustering stock owned by the Aboriginal community at Palumpa. This encouraged affiliated families from the neighbouring communities of Wadeye and Palumpa and Peppimenarti to begin regular dry season camping visits to the valley. For the older community this provided a belated opportunity to re-acquaint themselves with the ancestral sites and food resources, which the Majalindi holds in abundance.

When the Australian army subsequently acquired the southern pastoral lease of Bradshaw Station for training purposes in 1996 and sought a general site clearance for the lease, there was an opportunity to explore Aboriginal connections and knowledge of the river on a wider scale. Between 1996 and 1998 detailed site and place name surveys were undertaken in cooperation with a number of older Aboriginal affiliates to the river country whose personal origins and early experiences were intimately tied to the area. Using a variety of field transport including helicopters, trucks, and boat trips, substantial areas of the river could be visited.

What emerged from these mutual explorations of country was a patchwork of detailed place-based knowledge and named sites, although gaps emerged in the toponymic map of the country, reflecting the localised consequences of demographic decline among the populations of the river estates. Collectively the cultural mapping revealed a detailed abundance of landscape-based cultural knowledge, in striking contrast to the comparative paucity of official European place names.

To date, over 100 place names and sites of significance have been recorded, located and documented in varying degree.^[40] Figure 2 illustrates the results of this cultural mapping in general terms. The map reflects the knowledge of a comparatively small group of traditional owners who, individually, may only have a detailed knowledge about segments or particular regions of the river, but who can collectively identify a unique world of place-based cultural meanings.

Place names recorded for the river estate known as Yambarnyi are a case in point. This region lies in north-west Bradshaw Station on the western reaches of the Fitzmaurice and there are no longer any living traditional owners with detailed knowledge of the locations of significant places on the estate. Access to a comparatively rich store of this knowledge, however, was made possible by the enthusiastic participation of an elderly Aboriginal woman, Polly Wandanga, now resident in Kununurra (WA). Polly was married to a former senior man of the Jaminjung language patri-country of Yambarnyi, and spent her youth footwalking between the Fitzmaurice and Legune Station where she worked for many years as a cook. In a series of extended helicopter surveys it proved possible to follow in Wandanga’s earlier footsteps, so to speak, and identify with her the places and prominent cultural features of the landscape. In this way she located two prominent footwalk trails and their sequence of place names. One path followed the hills and shallow waterholes that fringe the estuarine mud flats for use in the wet season. A second dry-season track followed a large tributary of the Fitzmaurice inland past the cliffs of Wiritmangiung to the Victoria River near Purulun or Entrance Island.

Through these exercises, Wandanga was able to reveal unique sequences of place names across a broad landscape that remains otherwise unknown and un-visited by other Aboriginal affiliates to the country, and largely devoid of any cartographically named natural features.