Of Human Bondage: The Breaking In of Stockmen in Northern Australia

This article examines the cultural forms through which the young European‐Australian stockmen who work on the cattle stations of north Queensland are socialised. Exploring their interactions with a social and physical landscape and their rites of passage, as manifested in everyday actions, performance and material culture, it reveals how – and why – they are given little choice in acquiring values which are intensely adversarial to the land and to the indigenous people of Australia. It also explores the relationship between the transmission of particular values to these young men and the wider political and hegemonic role of the pastoral sub‐culture in defining Australian national identity. 1 1 It has take me a while to lasso and subdue this ethnographic beast, and in the course of the struggle I have benefited greatly from the advice of colleagues at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology in Oxford, the Pitt Rivers Museum, the University of Wales, Lampeter and fellow Australianists at the Centre for Australian Studies in Wales and at the Menzies Centre in London. I am also most grateful to Neil Maclean and his anonymous referees for their many helpful suggestions and comments. I would like to pay an affectionate tribute to the young stockmen on the cattle properties of Cape York's western coast: at Rutland Plains, Koolatah, Highbury, Drumduff, Sefton and the other stations where I was invited to ‘sling my swag’. Behind the sabre‐rattling that I have quoted, most of these young men were good folk: they were largely tolerant of have a female (and a bloody pom too!) in their midst, generously sharing stories, explaining their lives, making hat‐catchers and belts for me, and showing me how to break horses and the occasional bone. I have had a little feminist fun in considering their performances of Masculinity, but I haven't forgotten that what they do often requires real courage and determination. Though I have tried here to point to the political hegemony of their role and its potentially bleak consequences, I hope that an understanding of their sub‐culture and its pressures will assist the resolution of some of the conflicts in which they find themselves entangled.