ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses that mutual incomprehension and suspicion did not necessarily underpin initial engagements between Australian exploring expeditions and Aboriginal people. Challenging the recent proposition that these engagements are all but indistinguishable from encounters with pastoralists, prospectors, and other agents of settler colonialism. Attack Creek, near Tennant Creek, had been the scene of the affray that terminated Stuart's fourth expedition, and that looms large in many contemporary versions of frontier history as characteristic of the colonial period. Erving Goffman redefinition of encounter as interaction and performance helped shift focus in studies of the frontier from one-dimensional representations of the other, or from standard characterizations of the colonizing, polarizing European to the actual dynamics of colonial encounters. A key factor to be considered in evaluating the early frontier encounters is the presence of Aboriginal guides among expedition parties. Women were kept apart from initial contacts between visiting Aboriginal groups, and this convention was certainly applied when European expedition parties were nearby.