Stolen Wages Common Life: Mervyn Street Paintings

We walk off after song’s eclipse, walkabout’s extensity, a season been said goodbye to and hello the cattle who’s all lined in a row and whose tails become the whip. How could you get past the bad smell of it all, when the very territory that makes flight possible is itself the zone of enclosure and relegation from which you must become outlaw? In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, cattle and sheep stations in the north of the country displaced Aboriginal populations, gutted homelands, and were precipitated by massacres and summary killings. Spearing a cow for something to eat, or as strategy to combat pastoral settlement, could result in the punishment of death. Yet, some of these stations are spoken of with fondness by mob who worked on them, and as “enclave[s] of stability within their landscape of terror.”