This book jumps into the arena to ‘bulldog’ a deceptively simple idea. Dislocating the frontier goes beyond images of a progressive or disastrous frontier to rethink the frontier imagination itself. In re-imagining the frontier in Australia, we do not discount Aboriginal dispossession. Nor are we enjoined in a critique of colonialism, or a critique of a critique of colonialism. Confronted by the complexity of Aboriginal-Settler encounters and their long, entwined histories, we offer interpretative analysis that acknowledges resistance and indigenous autonomy as well as contingencies, contentions and complexities. As a mythic arena, the frontier is a site of violence, replacement and nation-building. And yet, this book shows that it is also a site of productive assertions of dilemmas, and of unexpected engagements toward change. It is, thus, a continuing site of cultural action. And as a number of authors to this volume advert, in some parts of Australia a post-colonial frontier is emerging that jostles and upsets the classical frontier imagination without, as yet, seeking to bury it.

This book began in September 1999 in Darwin. The geographic and mythic significance of North Australia as frontier territory has long been acknowledged; we believed that a located conference would draw on both the setting and the weight of history to enhance the vitality of the contributions. The conference and this collection acknowledge the frontier to be conceptually pervasive and elusive, as well as being provocatively catalytic. These essays show that a critical and comparative approach to analysing the frontier is an essential part of decolonising thought. Collectively, the essays reveal diverse aspects of the frontier; in representation, performance, society and politics. Individually and collectively, the contributing writers set out to chart meanings and experiences of the frontier in their contemporary multivalent complexity.

In 1999 we understood these issues to be part of an expanding discourse on the frontier, in the mode that Furniss discusses so eloquently in Chapter 2. Since then, however, Autralian public life has been captured by a debate over the meaning of history and historical method, the meaning of the frontier, and the meaning of conflict. Labelled ‘history wars’ this debate has clarified a conservative position that seeks to reconfigure analysis of the frontier by framing it in terms of how history is told and confining it to the past and to zones of conflict (for example, see Windschuttle 2002, Manne 2003, Macintyre 2003, Attwood and Foster 2003, Attwood 2005). The history wars are on-going. Attwood’s recent (2005) work contextualises the debates and addresses the main issues in a profoundly scholarly and yet accessible way.

Dislocating the frontier stakes out a position that both speaks to, and refuses to be bound by, the terms of the current debates about the frontier. The history wars have shown a narrowing of focus: the frontier has been reduced from a zone of encounter and interaction to a zone of conflict; conflict has been reduced to killing; killing has been reduced to deliberate gunshots; body counts have become a measure of violence. In the process, historians have been stereotyped as people who seek to promote accounts of the past that focus on particular types of conflict and particular levels of body counts. Attwood (2005:191) reminds us that in debates about the past it is not only the past that is at stake:

To the extent that the debate reduces the terms of engagement, to that extent it reduces the possibilities for understanding the complexities of the past and of the past in the present. These reductions impair our capacity to imagine the future as well as to engage fully with the present and the past.

Dislocating the frontier is provocatively multi-vocal when read in light of the history wars. In our emphasis on contemporary complexity, the authors implicitly argue for a multitude of types of interactions that are on-going. These essays allow the intricacies of real life to take precedence over the singularities that have come to dominate the history wars. They seek to examine and celebrate subtlety and complexity in an arena that is in danger of being turned into a shadow zone of caricature and stereotype.

We acknowledge the Co-operative Research Centre for the Sustainable Development of Tropical Savannas at the Northern Territory University which provided the main funding for the conference. The Northern Territory Museum hosted the event; the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority supported the travel of some speakers, and staff of the North Australia Research Unit of the Australian National University helped in the organisation. ANU E-Press staff have been a delight to work with, and we gratefully acknowledge their dedication to the embattled project of scholarly publication.