The frontiersmen who came to the Victoria River District of Australia's Northern Territory included cattle and horse thieves, outlaws, capitalists, dreamers, drunks, madmen and others, from the explorers of the 1830s and 1850s to the founders of the big stations in the 1880s and 1890s, and the cattle duffers in the early 1900s. This book looks at them all. Drawing on painstaking research into obscure and rich documentary sources, Aboriginal oral traditions, and firsthand investigations conducted in the region over thirtyfive years, Darrell Lewis pieces together the complex interactions between the environment, the powerful and warlike Aboriginal tribes and the settlers and their cattle, which produced what truly became A Wild History.
Darrell Lewis is an historian and archaeologist who, for the past 40 years, has lived among and worked with Aboriginal and white Australians in the Northern Territory. Travelling by four wheel drive, helicopter, boat and on foot, his work has taken him to many remote regions to record historic sites and Aboriginal rock paintings. He has written books on rock art, settler history, cattle station technology and environmental history. Among his publications are The Rock Paintings of Arnhem Land, Australia (1988), Beyond the Big Run (1995), Slower than the Eye Can See (2002) and The Murranji Track (2007). He is currently employed at the National Museum of Australia where he is writing a history of the search for the lost explorer, Ludwig Leichhardt.