A Wild History
Life and Death on the Victoria River Frontier
By Darrell Lewis
Shortlisted for the Northern Territory Chief Minister’s
History Book Award 2013.
* * *
"If Ned Kelly had been gentler and more learned but just as much a bushman he might have written A Wild History"
— Tom Griffiths, Inside Story, 13/12/2012* * *
On December 22, 2012, in The Australian, journalist and author Nicolas Rothwell nominated A Wild History as his Book of the Year.
* * *
"Now at last this majestic tract of north Australia has its defining history...Wild tales, dark times, deep history."
— Nicolas Rothwell, The Australian, 26/05/2012
About A Wild History
In 1883 pastoralists began to drive great herds of cattle into Victoria River District of Australia’s Northern Territory. They entered a vast tropical land of big rivers, wide plains, and rugged ranges. It was a cattleman’s 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 – a serpent that had to be banished – and a twenty year war ensued. The cattlemen won, but it was a pyrrhic victory. 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, capitalists, dreamers, drunks, madmen and others. Together they established massive stations of up to 12,000 square miles on the traditional lands of the Aborigines. 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 at the ‘golden era’ of the cattle duffers in the early 1900s.
Drawing on painstaking research into obscure though rich documentary sources, Aboriginal oral traditions, and first-hand investigations in the region over thirty-five years, Darrell Lewis pieces together the complex interactions between the environment, the powerful and warlike Aboriginal tribes and the settlers and their cattle, which produced what truly became A Wild History.
"It is a story with which every Australian should become familiar."
— Henry Reynolds
A Wild History was launched by Professor Tom Griffiths on 15 March 2012.
Read the launch speech.
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. The Victoria River Country: Land and People
2. First Contact
3. The Advance Scouts of Settlement
4. The Coming of the Cattle
5. Unquiet Times
6. Jasper Gorge
7. Captain Joe’s Bradshaw
8. The Wild Wardaman Warriors
9. The Victoria River Sheep Saga
10. Hard-Riding Individualists
11. The Nest of Reputed Thieves
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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.
Media inquiries
For media inquiries, please contact our Marketing Coordinator, Sarah Cannon.
Copyright
While many of our books are published online for free, this does not mean that the books are in the 'public domain': copyright laws do still apply.
Copyright for all material published on this site is owned or licensed exclusively to Monash University Publishing. All rights reserved. Apart from any uses permitted by Australia's Copyright Act 1968, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process or in any form without prior written permission of the copyright owners. Inquiries should be directed to the publisher, Monash University Publishing.
Readers are free to read, copy, download, print and display a work provided that:
• this is solely for personal use or use within the reader’s organisation;
• full acknowledgement is made of the author/s and the original copyright owner;
• the work is not used for any commercial gain in any form; and
• the reader in no way alters, transforms or builds on the work outside of its use in normal academic scholarship without the express permission of the author and publisher of the publication in question.
In all cases of re-use or distribution, readers or authors must make clear to others the license terms of the work. Enquiries should be directed to Monash University Publishing.
Authors of Monash University Publishing titles are not permitted to publish these works on any website other than their personal sites, without written permission from the publisher. Authors are encouraged to post the title of their book on any website and post links on any site that direct readers to the Monash University Publishing site.Every effort has been made to obtain copyright permissions for the images reproduced in our publications. If you are a copyright owner of materials reproduced in one of our works and have concerns regarding their use please contact Monash University Publishing.
