Frontier intimacies and estrangements: Amanda Nettelbeck, ‘Proximate Strangers and Familiar Antagonists: Violence on an Intimate Frontier’, Australian Historical Studies, 47, 2, 2016, pp. 209-224 | settler colonial studies blog

Frontier intimacies and estrangements: Amanda Nettelbeck, ‘Proximate Strangers and Familiar Antagonists: Violence on an Intimate Frontier’, Australian Historical Studies, 47, 2, 2016, pp. 209-224

21May16

Abstract: A generation of scholarship on the experiences of the frontier—spanning models of violent conflict to various kinds of intimacy—has been highly influential in building a nuanced picture of Australia’s colonial race relations. Regionally-focused histories provide a valuable avenue for bringing these models of frontier historiography together within the same frame, because it is at the localised level of social relations that the cross-hatched intersections between violence and intimacy can emerge into clearest view. This article traces the threads of cross-cultural encounter on one Australian frontier to assess how violent conflict could arise as much from conditions of inter-connectedness and familiarity as from conditions of strangeness and fear, and to ask, under such conditions, what kinds of frontier violence drew the intervention of the law.

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