ABSTRACT
One of the much mythologized aspects of Australian Aboriginal behaviour has been the “walkabout”, usually understood in terms of some internal urge that results in Aboriginal people leaving a locality without notice to travel for travel’s sake.2 It was a concept often called on by pastoral station managers, and other employers of Aboriginal labour across the continent, to account for the disappearance of members of their workforce without notice, or their unexpected reappearance. The mystery surrounding such movements was largely of the employers’ own making: their overweening self-interest and complete lack of concern for Aboriginal people as social persons meant that few Aboriginal people could expect a request for leave to attend a ceremony, or to visit kin, to be granted. Indeed, until the middle of the twentieth century the police in many areas of north Australia, were used to track down and return Aboriginal workers who left a cattle station outside the wet season lay-off period.
