Paper short abstract:

Aboriginal people of the NT’s Victoria River region evoke the metaphor of ‘bullocky’ (cattle) to describe people subjected to dehumanising conditions. In this paper I apprehend the metaphor to discuss relations between historical and contemporary circumstances, namely slavery and hyperincarceration.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers the trajectory of settler-colonial occupation of the Northern Territory’s Victoria River region through the idiom of cattle, or ‘bullocky’. The pastoral industry was and remains the most extensive form of occupation in the top end of the Australian continent and was central to the development of state, territory and regional economies at the expense, dispossession and forced labour of pastoral land’s Aboriginal owners. Decades on from the categorial expulsion of Aboriginal workers from the industry, cattle and cattle work continue to play a significant part in everyday Aboriginal life, imagination, aspiration and metaphor in the region. As part of a broader body of work considering the impact of hyperincarceration in the lives of Victoria River people, families and communities, I approach the concepts of slavery, commodity, control and imprisonment through the local metaphor of ‘bullocky’. This notion links past histories with present material conditions which (continue to) render Aboriginal people as expendable, inhuman and destined for elimination via containment.