The Northern Gulf lowlands is a remote savanna region of Far North Queensland, Australia. It has open grasslands with sparse tree cover and is extensively inundated in the wet season. Access and movement is restricted for up to six months a year. The area supports large cattle stations, among some of the largest in Australia. Except for most station residents, the population of the area is largely Aboriginal and lives in townships at Normanton, Kowanyama and Chillagoe.
The pastoral industry provides an important layer to Aboriginal life. On Friday or Saturday night, the sound of households in Aboriginal townships such as Normanton, Kowanyama, Pormpuraaw or Chillagoe, is of country and western music and in particular the songs of Slim Dusty (this was so in the 1990s and 2000s when I lived there). Ask any young boy or girl what they want to be when the grow up and the answer invariably is ‘I want to be a ringer’ or ‘I want to be a stockman’. The Rodeo is the social highlight of the year in Kowanyama and is complete with a carnival and formal ball, and election of local girls as Rodeo Queen and her attendants.
The photographs in the Peta Hill collection show Aboriginal stockworkers at work in the region in the mid-1990s. They were taken on pastoral properties including Kowanyama, and Koolatah and Southwell Stations.
The industry has left its imprint on Aboriginal geographies of the region with numerous named places in the form of stockyards, gates and wells and bores in the landscape, to complement indigenous geographies based on the numerous tribal domains and languages of the lowlands.
This unique toponymy, a blend of traditional and modern, is not only reflected in language and the naming of places but also in the use of pastoral infrastructure by Aboriginal families as seasonal homelands.
Stock routes and the seasonal movement of cattle along them have been a major feature of Gulf lowland landscapes for more than a century. As well as being the main economic arteries of the region, they are symbols of an 'outback' lifestyle and of a wider Australian identity that is shared in popular songs, poetry and literature.