The Fitzmaurice River^[41] in the western Northern Territory remains an enigmatic region of the north, arguably for both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people alike. From a broader Australian viewpoint, since the first exploratory European journeys into the north west until the present day, the Fitzmaurice River has been regarded as a remote or wild region beyond the scrutiny, security and comforts of settled Australia. In the popular imagination, the river is a place of physical dangers and hostile nature; latently so in its remote unpeopled expanse of some 10 000 km², and manifestly so in its treacherous currents and sand bars, as well as the many large saltwater crocodiles that populate the river channels and banks. In the past one measure of the frontier character of the river, for non-Aboriginals, lay in its threat of attack from hostile Aborigines. Today its wilderness status is couched in terms of remoteness, ‘scenic beauty and superficially unspoiled pristine state’.^[42]

I have also argued that the historical process of colonialism on the Fitzmaurice River and its dislocating effect on resident Aboriginal populations has contributed to the emergence of frontier-like perceptions of the river among the descendants of the Fitzmaurice River ancestors. Physical separation from the river and an emergent alienation from the historical experiences and cultural knowledge of the past contribute to this sense of a frontier quality.

In recent years, this disjuncture or emergent frontier in contemporary Aboriginal perceptions of the river is undergoing a process of re-affirmation and reclamation. Drawing on the threads of knowledge and personal memories from a small group of senior affiliates, there has been a concerted effort to recall and reinvigorate traditional relationships to the Fitzmaurice landscape. In this sense one might speak of a double notion of the contemporary frontier on the river, one which remains in a kind of dynamic tension. First, there is the conventional settler frontier, a frontier which remains in the process of appropriating the ‘new’, although seemingly stalled through an absence of settlement and domestication. Second, one can speak of an incipient Aboriginal frontier which is undergoing another kind of appropriation, that of the old and once familiar, as contemporary Aboriginal communities reassert long-standing associations with the river. Perhaps in the recent collaborative and consultative exercise of mapping place names and mythologies along the river, a collaboration of indigenous and exdigenous, are the tentative steps towards a post-frontier reconciliation on the Fitzmaurice.