A Wild History: Life and Death on the Victoria River Frontier

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In 1883 white men began to drive great herds of cattle into the Victoria River District of Australia's Northern Territory, one of the last of Australia's frontiers. They entered a vast and complex tropical land of big rivers, wide plains, and rugged ranges. It was a cattlemans paradise, but also a paradise for the Aboriginal people who had lived there for thousands of years. Each side came to see the other as the serpent in the garden that had to be banished. A 20 year war ensued, and ultimately both sides lost the coming of the cattle began the destruction of the paradise for both. The frontiersmen who came to the district included cattle and horse thieves, outlaws, big capitalists, dreamers, drunks, fools, madmen and others. Together they established massive stations of up to 12,000 square miles. This book looks at them all, from the explorers of the 1830s and 1850s to the founders of the big stations in the 1880s and 1890s, and finally the golden era of the cattle thieves in the early 1900s.It looks at the complex interactions between the environment, the powerful and warlike Aboriginal tribes and the settlers and their cattle complex interactions which produced what truly became, A Wild History. Key audience: Australian history, race relations, cultural studies, plus general audience (really anyone interested in Australian history).

Reviews

It is a story with which every Australian should become familiar.

An extraordinary inversion of the Australian frontier with which we think we are familiar and a brilliant piece of mythbusting.

A very readable portrait of a genuine frontier ... an isolated outpost whose isolation only really ended in the late 20th century.

A gift to the nation.

Author Bio

Darrell Lewis is an historian and archaeologist who, for the past 40 years, has lived among and worked with Aboriginal and white Australians in the Northern Territory. Travelling by four wheel drive, helicopter, boat and on foot, his work has taken him to many remote regions to record historic sites and Aboriginal rock paintings. He has written books on rock art, settler history, cattle station technology and environmental history. Among his publications are The Rock Paintings of Arnhem Land, Australia (1988), Beyond the Big Run (1995), Slower than the Eye Can See (2002) and The Murranji Track (2007). He is currently employed at the National Museum of Australia where he is writing a history of the search for the lost explorer, Ludwig Leichhardt.