In his conclusion to Triumph of the Nomads, Geoffrey Blainey mused that some Aborigines may well have celebrated the arrival of ‘the matting sails’ of Macassar boats, the ‘summer birds of passage’ that had come to the Gulf country and elsewhere for hundreds of years, to trade peacefully. This he contrasted with the white sails of English ships on the East Coast in the late 18th century; Blainey described the latter as ‘harbingers of a gale’ that would eventually ‘silence the sounds of hundreds of languages’.
In a considered account of the early Anglo-Saxon presence in the Gulf country, Tony Roberts’s Frontier Justice reveals—in frequently disturbing detail—the confrontation between an ancient tribal society and a civilisation from another world that was dependent upon livestock, trade and expansion; both needed the same land. The clash in the Gulf country began a little over 130 years ago. As Roberts reveals, it was a meeting of the unknowable and unknowing; it was punctuated at rare moments by humanity and the beginnings of understanding, but mostly it was just a tense era of mistrust, fear and bloodshed on both sides. With such sentiments holding court, minor initial confrontations grew quickly to larger-scale conflicts, and by the early 20th century a bloody fight had been settled in favour of the men of livestock. The cost to indigenous cultures was high—many languages were indeed silenced.
The era was also a complex one. As Frontier Justice makes altogether clear, some of the whites involved had much blood on their hands. Yet these same men and the lives they led in ‘opening up’ the Gulf country to pastoral franchise are also at the heart of Australia’s frontier mythology. That Roberts can present all of these concurrent realities in one scholarly and thoughtful book is a significant achievement.
Frontier Justice begins with a description of the Gulf country and what would become—for the whites at least—its major artery: the Coast Track, a rough trail stretching a thousand kilometres from far north-west Queensland to Katherine in the Northern Territory. The early passages of the book provide an important summary of how life was lived up until the first confrontations, including the way that land was divided up between many distinct Aboriginal tribes in the Gulf country and the breakdown of tribal lands into ‘estates’ that had their own ‘owners’ (ngimarringki) and ‘managers’ (jungkayi). The former had ‘primary spiritual responsibility for the estate’,