Dislocating the Frontier: Essaying the Mystique of the Outback

Abstract

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.

The South Australian frontier and its legacies: Remembering and representing the Mount Bryan murders

“…For decades now, the frontier has been widely understood to have been a place and time of accommodation as well as resistance, of intimacy as well as violence, of dynamic cross-cultural exchange and hybridity (see e.g. Clendinnen, 2003;Jones, 2007;Krichauff, 2011;Rose & Davis, 2005;Shellam, 2009). Twenty-first-century researchers are well placed to provide nuanced, comparative accounts that communicate advances in frontier scholarship and expand understandings of the colonial experience.…”

Memory in Place: Locating colonial histories and commemoration

“…For decades now, the frontier has been widely understood to have been a place and time of accommodation as well as resistance, of intimacy as well as violence, of dynamic cross-cultural exchange and hybridity (see e.g. Clendinnen, 2003;Jones, 2007;Krichauff, 2011;Rose & Davis, 2005;Shellam, 2009). Twenty-first-century researchers are well placed to provide nuanced, comparative accounts that communicate advances in frontier scholarship and expand understandings of the colonial experience.…”