Frontier Justice: A History of the Gulf Country to 1900

by Tony Roberts

“Frontier Justice is a very powerful and important book. It appears at a particularly significant time given the intense current debate about Aboriginal history. It is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the story of the Australian frontier.”
Professor Henry Reynolds


A challenging and illuminating history, Frontier Justice brings a fresh perspective to the Northern Territory’s remarkable frontier era. For the newcomer, the Gulf country—from the Queensland border to the overland telegraph line, and from the Barkly Tableland to the Roper River—was a harsh and in places impassable wilderness. To explorers like Leichhardt, it promised discovery, and to bold adventurers like the overlanders and pastoralists, a new start. For prospectors in their hundreds, it was a gateway to the riches of the Kimberley goldfields. To the 2,500 Aboriginal inhabitants, it was their physical and spiritual home. From the 1870s, with the opening of the Coast Track, cattlemen eager to lay claim to vast tracts of station land brought cattle in massive numbers and destruction to precious lagoons and fragile terrain. Black and white conflict escalated into unfettered violence and retaliation that would extend into the next century, displacing, and in some areas destroying, the original inhabitants.
The vivid characters who people this meticulously researched and compelling history are indelibly etched from diaries and letters, archival records and eyewitness accounts. Included are maps with original place names, and previously unpublished photographs and illustrations.

“A commanding study of race relations in the remote Gulf country. Tony Roberts uncovers compelling evidence of a litany of violence across some forty-odd years of rough borderlands dispossession in an encompassing, powerful and disturbing history.”
Professor Raymond Evans

316 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2005

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Reviews

[Yuri Sharon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nobody should doubt that the pastoral frontier’s westward spread across Queensland and into the Northern Territory was marked by many bloody episodes. Tony Roberts’s deeply researched and carefully written history of the Gulf Country the southern coast and hinterland of the Gulf of Carpentaria demonstrates in shocking detail the vicious savagery of that era.
A former ministerial advisor and senior official with the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, Roberts knows the region and its people well. Such local knowledge and experience, enhanced by thorough archival research, has enabled him to plausibly and coherently elucidate what he frankly admits is often a rather scanty historical record.
Unlike some historians of regional Australia, Roberts clearly distinguishes and maintains a judicious balance between the reliably established fact, the plausible conjecture and all those unsubstantiated stories that rise like mist to fill historical vacuums. Some of the academic participants in the current debate about Aboriginal history could learn a thing or two about assessing historical evidence from this former bureaucrat.
His handling of oral testimony, perhaps the largest bone of contention in the History Wars, is exemplary. While not making the mistake of dismissing oral traditions outright, Roberts knows that historians who merely repeat such stories about the past are not doing their job. Without some corroboration from sources contemporary to the events in question, stories remain just that stories.
Roberts applies the same methodological rigor to old people’s memoirs, which are often essentially oral accounts written down decades after the event. In the case of the Malakoff Creek Massacre, for example, the only known record of what occurred in April-May 1886 is an old stockman’s account, published almost fifty years later in a newspaper.
An attentive reading of the archives, however, confirms several of the story’s key claims (who was where when) and gives credence to the old man’s boast that he was a member of a police-led party of native trackers and stockmen that killed about sixty Aborigines during a dawn raid on a sleeping camp.
While careful to assess each incident on the evidence available, Roberts also recognizes that there is a larger imperative, the wider context of aggravation to consider. The whites were protecting their cattle and horses, valuable investments upon which their future prosperity depended; the blacks were protecting their land and water, the very sources of their existence.
Once the killing started and the cycle of revenge, retribution and “punishment” commenced, the result was inevitable. Spears and clubs could never match mounted men armed with Snider and Martini-Henry rifles accurate, heavy calibre weapons that could kill a man over a kilometre away.
Between 1878 and 1885 more than 200,000 cattle and perhaps 10,000 horses passed along the Coast Track from Queensland into the Territory. Apart from causing irrevocable environmental damage, such heavy traffic attracted stock thieves. Other outlaws, all armed and dangerous, were attracted to the region because, until police and a magistrate were stationed at Borroloola in late 1886, the country for a 1000 km west of Burketown was, literally, lawless.
As their land and women were stolen and their existence became ever more perilous, Aboriginal resistance stiffened. Roberts believes that by the mid- to late 1880s a guerilla war was being waged, but he qualifies this assessment by saying “there was no tradition of tribes joining forces … so there was never a concerted, unified attack against one station at a time”.
Throughout his book Tony Roberts assiduously avoids even a hint of the polemic, setting an admirable example of dispassionate scholarship. Those History War warriors who wish to enlist Roberts as one of their lance bearers should perhaps check which way the sharp end of the stick is actually pointing.

[Grantley Leith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Frontier Justice Review

A great book to read on the history of the Carpentaria area of Northern Territory.
Well written and good research.

[John Monten · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very powerful.....essential reading.

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding book. Great history, well documented and written. The story of the 19th century Gulf region in Australia's Northern Territory is violent, bloody, and daunting. This is an excellent read.