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H istorical scholarship over the past two decades has seen a growing awareness of colonial processes and in particular the dramatic and often violent events of the colonial frontier. For Indigenous people, depopulation and dispossession are all-too-familiar themes of colonialism . In Australia, rewriting these violent themes into colonial history has undermined European narratives of colonialism by introducing Indigenous stories of agency, resistance, and survival from the frontier. Historical sources alone are, however, inadequate for the task of exploring activities on the far side of the frontier, because without Indigenous voices the process of rewriting will continue to be a colonial enterprise, appropriating, suffocating, ignoring, or otherwise marginalizing non-European views and experiences of the past. Australian archaeologists have begun to make contributions to writing so-called “alternative” con27 three Ritual Response Place Marking and the Colonial Frontier in Australia Ian J. McNiven and Lynette Russell It is time that Australian historians sought to understand the Aboriginal response to conquest and dispossession. To do so it is necessary to seriously explore the farside of the frontier and the underside of the caste barrier. Henry Reynolds, Aboriginal-European Contact History (emphasis added) tact histories. In this connection, Birmingham (1992:178) identified two key questions that guide research on Australian contact sites: “First, how is the documentary record confirmed, complemented or challenged by the archaeological evidence? Second , what further questions arise from queries or gaps in the documentary record for which the archaeologist is likely to find answers?” In her own study, Birmingham (1992) found that Aboriginal Tasmanians at Wybalenna reserve resisted colonial domination by strategically resisting different aspects of European culture. Related studies have also investigated accommodation and resistance at other early-European frontier sites such as homesteads (Murray 1993) and shepherd’s huts (Wolski 2000). On a narrower scale, investigations have shown the social, economic, and perhaps even ceremonial circumstances in which Aboriginal people appropriated, enculturated, and used items of “European” material culture such as bottle glass (Wolski and Loy 1999) and clay tobacco pipes (Courtney and McNiven 1998). Accommodation and resistance are models of frontier dynamics that have become central in Australian contact historiography. In most cases, historical research has focused on the frontier as the point of Aboriginal-European interaction and dispossession . In this sense, Australian contact archaeology has followed suit. This research focus privileges both physical encounters and secular activities as frontier dynamics. In this chapter, we concur with recent developments in Australian contact historiography that a broadened perspective on frontier dynamics is required that includes activities that took place on the “farside” of the frontier. The issue we explore is Aboriginal ceremonies and rituals, especially those associated with the marking of place such as with rock-art, which aimed to affect the nature of frontier encounters and control of lands. Research in this area is well established in North America (e.g., Drooker 1996; Klassen 1999; Miller and Hamell 1986; Stoffle et al. 2000) and Africa (e.g., Jolly 1996, 1999), but few Australian researchers apart from historian Henry Reynolds (1981) have appreciated the potential significance of these nonsecular responses as a frontier dynamic. Following Reynolds, we believe that an essential feature of most frontier encounters is resistance and the control of resources and land. For European historians , frontiers have tended to be represented as geographical phenomena that divided landscapes into civilized and uncivilized realms. Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to critique the concept of frontiers in Australian contact historiography , we do note that the idea of a frontier as somehow marking a line of European conquest was a colonial illusion (see Russell 2001a). In reality, frontier encounters were extremely complex affairs that could be violent or peaceful at different times and at different places. Furthermore, European colonizers may have partitioned the landscape into conquered and unconquered spaces, but Aboriginal people neither acknowledged conquest nor ceded sovereignty to the colonizers. Thus, frontier dynamics are not only about encounters between people, but clashes over the power to control lands. So how have Australian contact historians approached this dynamic and what historical evidence exists to lay the foundations for archaeological explorations of ritual responses by Aboriginal people to invasion? FRONTIER DYNAMICS AND RITUAL RESPONSE Beginning with the foundational work of Rowley (1972) and later Reynolds (1978, 1981), historical research in Australia shifted focus from memorializing European explorers to an exposition of the “hidden ” and often violent dimensions of Australia’s nineteenth-century colonial frontier (Broome 1982; Critchett 1990; Elder 1988; Evans et al...

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