Valuing Hard Work: ‘Station Times’, the Pioneer Complex and Settler-Descended Graziers’ Views on Work in Cape York Peninsula

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Valuing hard work: “Station times”, the pioneer complex and
settler-descended graziers’ views on work in Cape York
Peninsula
Mardi Reardon-Smith
Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation
221 Burwood Highway, Burwood Victoria 3125
Email: mardi.reardonsmith@deakin.edu.au
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3350-2352
Abstract
The historically unequal grazing industry in Cape York Peninsula, far northeast Queensland, gave rise to
intercultural relationships between Aboriginal stock workers and settler-descended graziers. However, in recent
decades, Aboriginal employment on cattle stations has fallen. Nowadays, many younger Aboriginal people work
in government-funded jobs which settler-descended graziers frame as ‘hand-out style’ work. Settler-descended
graziers have come to value an ethic of hard work related to both the Protestant work ethic and aspects of
pioneer mythology which are entwined with graziers’ senses of belonging. Contemporary Aboriginal people are
positioned by settler-descended graziers as having a ‘different’ relationship to work and lacking the valuation of
hard work that graziers deem a moral good. In their discussions of Aboriginal people as lacking a valuation for
‘hard work’, graziers seek to critique what they perceive as government overreach in the form of land rights and
government-funded jobs.
Keywords
Intercultural; labour relations; work ethic; pastoralism; pioneer complex; Aboriginal; Cape York Peninsula

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Introduction
Up until the 1970s, cattle stations in Cape York relied heavily upon a mostly Aboriginal
workforce, a situation that resulted in close interpersonal relationships that extend through
subsequent generations to the present day. Among older Aboriginal people and settler-
descended graziers alike, there is a sense that the era of significant Aboriginal employment
on cattle stations frequently resulted in and maintained positive relationships to work, the
land and each other, despite the violence and asymmetrical power relations that the industry
was built upon. Settler-descended graziers have come to value an ethic of hard work that is
due to a combination of the Protestant work ethic (Weber 1958) and aspects of pioneer
mythology which emphasise the importance of manual labour and are entwined with
graziers’ senses of belonging (Furniss 1997; Garbutt 2011; Reardon-Smith 2021). The high
value that graziers place on particular kinds of work is entwined with what graziers
understand to be productive labour, with those forms of work that can be understood as the
mixing of sweat with the soil (Jackson 2006; Garbutt 2011) framed as more valuable.
The introduction of Equal Wages and widespread reorganisation and mechanisation of the
rural industries in the 1960s and 1970s led to a decline in Aboriginal employment on cattle
stations, with ramifications for Aboriginal participation in waged labour and relationships to
paid work. These changes also resulted in social distance between Aboriginal and settler-
descended families. Nowadays, Aboriginal people are positioned by settler-descended
graziers as having a ‘different’ relationship to work and lacking the valuation of hard work
that graziers deem a moral good.

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Based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork between 2018 and 2019 with settler-
descended graziers1 2, Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service employees and Aboriginal
traditional owners, I explore how graziers’ valuation of a ‘work ethic’ shapes their
perspectives on contemporary Aboriginal peoples’ relationships to work in Cape York. In
their discussions of Aboriginal people as lacking the desire for ‘hard work’, graziers tap into
a long-standing deficit discourse that defines Aboriginal people and labour as lacking.
However, while such critiques are highly racialized, they are not simply a matter of
individual prejudice. Instead, this deficit discourse is put to work by graziers in a critique of
government intervention, support, and self-determination policies and is entwined with
graziers’ own senses of belonging in the region. These critiques both reveal what kinds of
labour are highly valued by graziers and demonstrate an awareness of and reaction to their
increasing marginality in the region.
Throughout this article the names of all people (including Aboriginal language group names)
and places have been anonymised.
Intercultural relationships, exploitation and changes in the pastoral industry
It is late in the dry season, hot, and I am sitting on the dusty concrete veranda outside the old
homestead at Fish Creek Station with Aboriginal elder Sammy3. We are drinking tea and
waiting for the relief of the afternoon breeze to come in off the ocean, across the salt pans and
1 While one grazing family acknowledged their mixed Aboriginal and settler descent to me, most grazing
families maintain that they are White. Even that family that did acknowledge their Aboriginal ancestry self-
identified as a ‘pioneer’ family, rather than Aboriginal. Throughout the text I use the term ‘setter-descended
graziers’ or ‘graziers’ interchangeably.
2 The substantive work with graziers was carried out on four cattle stations, each of which involved working
with 2-3 generations of extended families who would visit and stay at these stations occasionally. Additional
(less in-depth) research was carried out with a broader range of grazing families through social events, land
management and grazing forums, and occasional visits to their stations. This aspect of research was limited
smaller grazing operations in central and south-east Cape York, with multinational-owned cattle stations
declining to take part in the research.
3 All names of individuals, language groups and cattle stations have been changed to protect anonymity.

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down the old airstrip that we are facing. Sammy is eyeing the carloads of young Aboriginal
rangers kicking up dust as they drive back and forth from the fence line where they are
carrying out repairs. Sammy is reminiscing about how things were in back his working days.
He speaks about fencing when he was a young stockman working on the stations, and how
they had none of the star pickets or post-hole diggers that the young rangers are using.
Sammy tells me how he would work through the heat of the day building fences, cutting
timber using crosscut saws with big teeth that required a person on either end. Fencing was a
lot harder back then, Sammy reflects, ‘no post-hole digger, just shovel and crowbar, digging
from dawn til dusk’. He adds that on the days they were mustering the working hours were
even longer. Some nights he wouldn’t finish until well after dark. ‘It was all Aboriginal
stockmen in Cape York back then,’ Sammy reflects. He recalls how they used to muster the
cattle from a number of different stations and move them all the way from central Cape York
to the town where the saleyards were located, a distance of close to 500 kilometres. Sammy
explains that this trip took around three weeks as all the mustering was done on horseback,
and they had to be careful not to move the cattle too quickly in order to maintain their
condition. Smiling, Sammy tells me that at night someone would have to keep watch, riding
around the herd and singing to the cattle to put them to sleep. I ask Sammy what he would
sing. ‘Oh, any country and western song that came into your head!’ he tells me. By the time
they arrived at the saleyards, Sammy says, ‘the cattle were so quiet you could roll your swag
out beside them’. Winding up his story for the afternoon, Sammy tells me that, ‘it was a hard
life, but a good life’.
Alongside Sammy, many older Cape York Aboriginal people described to me their youth as
stockworkers as a ‘hard but good life’. Grazing continues to be spoken about by older
Aboriginal men and women in Cape York as a legitimate use of land, and a legitimate
industry for Aboriginal people to engage in. This perspective is shared by many Aboriginal

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people across Australia and is well documented in the literature (see Smith 2003a, 2003b;
Ottosson 2012; McGrath 1987; Davis 2005). It is well established that, as well as being a
historically unequal and frequently violent industry for Aboriginal people, the pastoral
industry enabled some Aboriginal people to continue to live on their areas of traditional
connection and fulfil their obligations to the landscape through the use of fire and ritual
activity (Smith 2003a, 2003b; Gill & Patterson 2007; May 1994; Ottosson 2012; Strang
1997). This history has resulted in a contemporary context in which many Aboriginal people
continue to consider cattle work to be a ‘proper’ Aboriginal pursuit (Smith 2003b, 33). For
many of the Aboriginal stockworkers I spoke with, their first and most formative work
experiences were on stations. Many of these men and women grew up ‘in the saddle’ and
describe these experiences as valuable for learning intimate knowledge about the land that
comprises their areas of traditional connection as well as learning the value of hard work.
Until the 1970s, many Aboriginal people came to work in the pastoral industry while living
under the highly restrictive measures of Queensland’s Aboriginals Protection and Restriction
of the Sale of Opium Act (1897) (Castle & Hagan, 1997). Often referred to simply as ‘the
Act’, this piece of legislation controlled where Aboriginal people lived and worked and
whom they could marry (Huggins, 1995; Smith, 2008). Decisions about Aboriginal people’s
lives were controlled by individuals known as ‘Protectors’ – a position often filled by local
police officers, who frequently carried out their duties with little oversight from the State
government (Huggonson, 1990; Smith, 2008). Aboriginal people sent to work on cattle
stations were not able to leave their employment, even if their employer was abusive or
withholding their wages, resulting in a system akin to indentured labour. Pastoralists profited
significantly from this system, which saw Aboriginal labour valued at around a quarter of
what white workers were paid (de Plevitz, 1998, pp. 143-144). Importantly, the lack of
oversight and regulation of the pastoral industry – particularly in Queensland’s north – meant

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that many Aboriginal workers were not paid in wages at all, instead receiving only food and
board in return for their labour (de Plevitz, 1998; Huggins, 1995).
Graziers Kurt and Eileen, for instance, employed an Aboriginal couple, Betty and Winston,
for many years until the 1970s. Betty received no wage but her extended family was fed and
housed at the station. To Eileen, this was a payment ‘in kind’ that was an accepted practice at
the time on cattle stations. Betty and Winston’s daughter Daisy, too, discussed how Winston
worked from the age of 13 on stations and was not always paid wages for his work. Daisy did
not attribute any blame to Kurt and Eileen for this arrangement and told me she was ‘pretty
sure’ the family paid Winston a little bit, an arrangement confirmed by Eileen. I found a
similar hesitance to attribute blame with many older Aboriginal stock workers.
Where wages were paid, they were quarantined under the Act and Aboriginal people could
only access their wages in limited and prescriptive ways – to purchase tea, flour, tobacco and
products required for station work, often at inflated prices. Quarantined wages were often
pocketed by Protectors or drawn upon by the Queensland Government (Huggonson, 1990;
Castel & Hagan, 1997; de Plevitz, 1998). This system of wage quarantining has become
known as the Stolen Wages. In 2016, a class action launched against the Queensland
government was successful, resulting in a settlement of AUD$190m paid to 10,000 claimants
in 2019, but this amount did not match the true values of the wages stolen (Australian
Associated Press, 2019). Several older Aboriginal people discussed the injustice of their
unpaid wages with me but were eager to deflect the blame from graziers to particular
Protectors or the Queensland government in general.
Similar instances of simultaneous ambivalence, affection and respect from Aboriginal stock
workers for station bosses are described elsewhere in Australia. As Ottosson details in her
work with Aboriginal station workers in Central Australia, while people are aware of having

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been exploited by bosses, they tend to describe their relationships with station bosses as ‘a
personal trade-off, where each party depended on the other’ (2012, 192). Importantly,
Ottosson notes that though these relationships were blatantly unequal, Aboriginal workers
still possessed some degree of agency (2012, 192). Redmond describes a similar sentiment
among Ngarinyin people in the Kimberley. He points out that their ongoing relationship to a
pastoral station is understood as one of interdependency, but one that is ‘not generally
experienced as a negative form of intersubjectivity by Ngarinyin people’ (2005, 239).
Redmond found that the Ngarinyin men and women he worked with who live on an
outstation on a cattle station, ‘openly asserted that it was themselves who had “grown up” the
boss, made a “good bloke, good worker” out of him’ (2005, 238). This flips the script on
some of the non-Aboriginal graziers of Cape York, who would suggest that their ancestors
were responsible for making Aboriginal people into ‘good workers’, minimising that fact that
much of their own socialisation into work occurred in the mustering camp with older
Aboriginal stockmen as mentors.
People worked alongside each other on cattle stations in Cape York and formed relationships,
although their work was never on equal terms. This, though, was rarely discussed by older
Aboriginal people. As Merlan states in regard to the grazing industry around Katherine in the
Northern Territory,
(I)t is glaringly clear from an outsider’s point of view that there was no semblance of
equality between Aborigines and their white employers and that the Aborigine’s
conditions of employment were often materially meagre, sometimes generally
oppressive. Hence it is all the more interesting that many [Aboriginal] people... tend
not to comment on that situation, or to have a distinctive vocabulary of inequality
(Merlan 1998, 60).

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Despite instances of violence, racism and cruelty, despite the exploitation of Aboriginal
labour for little or no material gain for the Aboriginal stock workers, and despite the legacy
of stolen wages in the grazing industry, older Aboriginal people like, Sammy, tend to frame
their experiences of stock-work as largely positive because of the animal husbandry skills
they gained, their ability to remain living and working on their ancestral homelands, and
because of the relative independence that their wages, though low, allowed them. The ‘hard
but good life’ that such work entailed is held up against the under- and unemployment of
Aboriginal people from the 1960s onwards, as Aboriginal people’s ability to find work was
impacted by legislative changes like the introduction of Equal Wages and the reorganisation
of the rural industries towards increased mechanisation and smaller workforces.
Equal pay was introduced in Queensland in 1966 (May 1994), yet many settler-descended
grazing families continued to employ Aboriginal stock workers and have small communities
of Aboriginal people living on their stations into the 1970s, owing to lax government
oversight. Legislating around Equal Wages was the result of significant struggle by
Aboriginal people to achieve parity in wages, autonomy from the restrictive measures of ‘the
Act’, and land rights. The same year that Equal Wages were introduced in Queensland,
Gurindji, Mudburra and Warlpiri stockworkers staged a walk off from Wave Hill station in
Northern Territory, a protest which drew national attention and raised the prominence of
Aboriginal struggles for sovereignty (Merlan, 2005; Ward, 2016). The 1967 Referendum
demonstrated a change in the national consciousness and, from the early 1970s, government
policy shifted from protectionism to self-determination (Merlan, 2005). The legislating of
Equal Wages, though, resulted in a dramatic decline of Aboriginal employment on cattle
stations in Cape York and elsewhere. As Smith writes, ‘local pastoralists proved unable or
unwilling to employ more than a handful of Aboriginal workers under the new conditions’

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(2008, p. 206). Many settler-descended graziers today view this period as the time in which
their lives began to be impacted by a perceived over-reach of the State.
Around the same time, grazing and agricultural industries around the world were rationalising
and mechanising their practices in what has been called the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’
(Gibson 2019, 140). In Cape York, this revolution translated to increased reliance on fencing,
trap- paddocks, helicopter mustering, the use of nutritional supplements called ‘lick’, and
switching from horses to motorbikes or all-terrain vehicles. These changes occurred
gradually, with fences often being the first and one of the most significant changes. Each of
these transformations enabled graziers to rely on smaller and smaller workforces. Nowadays,
stations in Cape York are mainly run by a husband-and-wife team, with occasional assistance
from grown-up children, neighbours and contractors.
As stations employed less workers, many Aboriginal people shifted into nearby towns
(Smith, 2008). Without the domain of common work, Aboriginal people and White grazier
families no longer had the same level of everyday, incidental interaction that they had
previously shared. In her influential study of race relations in a regional town in New South
Wales, Cowlishaw highlighted the importance of shared work experiences in transgressing
cultural alterity, arguing that ‘familiarity develops through working together, and while the
work may foster notions of racial difference and rivalry may encourage antagonism, there are
also many occasions where common interests prevail’ (1988, 192). Even in an inherently
unequal and asymmetrical context, such as the pastoral industry, the domain of shared work
can function as a zone of intercultural relating (Merlan, 1998). Nowadays, the social gap
between settler-descended graziers and Aboriginal people in Cape York has widened, with
the Aboriginal people and graziers I conducted research with tending to socialise and work
with each other only occasionally. Among the cattle stations on which I conducted research,

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only one grazing family regularly employed an Aboriginal contract musterer. While many
older grazing couples kept in contact with particular elderly Aboriginal people which whom
they had worked in the past, this tended to amount to occasional phone calls and meeting in
person at social events – like rodeos – or incidentally when graziers would visit town to
attend healthcare appointments.
There is a sense among a number of the graziers I worked with that things were better ‘back
then’, in terms of the way of life and sense of community that using horses and large
workforces entailed, and because of the close relationships that existed between Aboriginal
and non-Aboriginal people. Importantly, graziers frame things as better before the
introduction of equal wages for Aboriginal people. Clearly, generations of these grazing
families benefited greatly from Aboriginal people as both an inexpensive labour force and
people highly skilled in stock work and possessing detailed knowledge of the land. Graziers
rarely – if ever – acknowledged how integral un- and underpaid Aboriginal labour was to the
establishing of their family businesses. Graziers, along with some older Aboriginal stock
workers, tend to read the situation of Aboriginal engagement in the grazing industry as
mutually beneficial, rather than an exploitative relationship, minimising the asymmetries
inherent in the situation. This shift in working relationships and increased social distance
between Aboriginal people and settler-descended graziers has created space for non-
Aboriginal graziers to criticise contemporary Aboriginal peoples’ relationships to work. This
critique is simultaneously cultural and generational and is rooted in historical factors,
revealing how certain forms of work are valued more highly than others by settler-descended
graziers.
Pioneer mythology, ‘hard work’, and government ‘hand-outs’

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I am sitting on the front veranda at Apollo station with settler-descended graziers Diane and
Bill, enjoying the early dry-season sunshine. Their house is large and open, with curtains in
lieu of doors that shift gently in the breeze. As usual, Bill, Diane and I are drinking tea and
eating home-made biscuits as we talk. Bill and Diane are describing to me how they
established Apollo station. They had bought Apollo in 1985 from Bill’s parents who excised
it from a much bigger block of land. The block had no house, no fences, no road. ‘As we tell
everybody,’ Diane says, ‘it was a bare block and we built everything. So, all the mistakes are
ours! We can’t blame anybody else. Even the road in,’ she laughs. In those early days, Bill
and Diane explain, they had almost no money behind them. They mostly worked away from
home contract mustering, brumby shooting, pig hunting, road work and, for a time, managing
a nearby roadhouse. ‘We used to just walk out, leave it all there,’ Diane tells me. ‘We had no
dogs, no chooks. We used to just turn the freezers off. In those days we had kerosene fridges.
We just turn them off and away we’d go, for the season.’
I heard some version of this story from a variety of graziers in Cape York. Graziers
frequently described to me their own kind of origin story which invariably involved making
‘something from nothing’ through their labouring on the land and their commitment to
finding a way to ‘make do’ through sheer hard work until they could accumulate enough
wealth to get ‘things moving’ on their stations. These narratives reveal graziers’ alignment
with what Furniss (1997, 23) has called the ‘pioneer complex’. In their origin stories, graziers
emphasise that they have had to work hard and overcome great adversity to eke out an
existence in what was a ‘wilderness’ prior to their occupation. As Furniss (2005, pp. 35-36)
has noted, this identification with the concept of ‘battling’ is what sets Australian frontier
mythology apart from that of Canada or the United States. Rather than a rich and prosperous
land, empty and available for the taking, Australia’s frontier mythology constructs the
continent as hostile, dangerous, and wild. In each form of frontier mythology, Indigenous

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labour and dwelling is erased. Frontier mythology relies on the fiction of ‘terra nullius’. Yet,
as in the Canadian and American contexts, such mythologising champions both rugged
individualism and personal sacrifice (Furniss, 2005). Absent from many of these graziers’
origin stories is the reliance that graziers had on cheap or unpaid Aboriginal labour during the
early days of their stations. An important vein that runs through each of these narratives is the
centrality of hard work. An emphasis on a strong work ethic is also very much evident in the
day to day running of stations in the present. When it is a busy period, graziers frequently
work long hours every day, mustering and processing stock through the yards, readying them
for sale. During more relaxed periods, graziers attend to bookwork and maintenance tasks. As
Cowlishaw found in her work among marginal graziers, similar to the ones with whom I have
worked, people ‘shared a faith that betterment and progress would occur cumulatively with
hard work, frugality and practical knowledge’ even as their material circumstances have
failed to markedly improve (1999, 203-204).
Discussions of work ethics in capitalist societies frequently reference Weber’s (1958) writing
on the Protestant ethic. Weber (1958) describes the drive to work as emerging out of Puritan
ideas about the religious value of labour and asceticism; a concept which underwent
transformation with the rise of Fordism but which retains a moral tone. While the concept of
the Protestant work ethic is relevant here, in the Cape York context it is entwined with
frontier mythology; hard work is valued because of its relationship to land, to the mixing of
sweat with the soil. For settler-descended people who dwell in rural locales, labouring on the
land is a cornerstone of their sense of belonging (see Read, 2000; Gill, 2005; Jackson, 2006;
Geschiere, 2009; Garbutt, 2011; Reardon-Smith, 2021). It is tied up with settler claims of
autochthony; of mixing the sweat with the land to be reborn as a ‘son [or daughter] of the
soil’ (Garbutt, 2011: 187-188). The kind of labour valued by graziers is masculine,
individualised, and economically productive. Importantly, as the origin story recounted by

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Bill and Diane reveals, graziers proudly assert that their labour has enabled them to ‘make
something from nothing’, obscuring the Aboriginal labour that their families’ stations and
legacies were built upon. Such an assertion is held up against government schemes to support
Aboriginal economic participation and land ownership, which graziers frame as ‘hand outs’.
The notion that Aboriginal people receive more government support than non-Aboriginal
people, and that this has had deleterious consequences for Aboriginal people’s wellbeing, is
common among settler-descended graziers and is unfounded, largely based on second-hand
anecdotal evidence. Many older graziers who grew up alongside Aboriginal people, often
attending the same schools, told me that they saw no reason for these Aboriginal people to
receive ‘handouts’. Grazier Eileen also voiced to me her belief that ‘the government’ has
encouraged people to see Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people as separate, through the
allocation of extra government support for Aboriginal people. Graziers’ assumptions around
government support are generally based on anecdotal evidence and awareness of provisions
for Indigenous-identified positions with employers like Main Roads and primary schools in
nearby towns. These ‘handouts’ seem to be understood differently to the handing back of
land as Aboriginal freehold and the training and support for Aboriginal people to engage in
cattle enterprises, though these, too, are criticised by graziers.
Many graziers criticised programs designed to encourage Aboriginal people to work in the
bush, on their areas of traditional connection. Grazier Eileen told me on a number of
occasions that she thinks there is a problem with Aboriginal people being ‘pushed’ into doing
work that they are not necessarily interested in or well-suited to. ‘Not every Aboriginal
person wants to work on country or work with cattle, or be a ranger,’ she once told me. The
problem with initiatives like government-funded Aboriginal-owned cattle stations, she

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explained, is that they are based on the assumption that this is what every Aboriginal person
wants. Aboriginal-run cattle stations are enthusiastically spoken about and participated in by
many Aboriginal people in Cape York. As Davis points out, pastoralism is perhaps the only
land-based commercial opportunity in northern Australia that links successive generations of
Aboriginal people to each other through their shared work histories (2004, 37-38) and thus is
highly valued. Smith has suggested that for many older Aboriginal people in Cape York,
obtaining ownership of a cattle station is the ‘holy grail of land rights’ (2003b, 32).
Recall Sammy, the elderly Aboriginal stockman introduced earlier in this article. Sammy and
his son Duane, the chairperson and manager of the local Aboriginal ranger group, live on
and off at Fish Creek station. Fish Creek has a dry-season population that fluctuates between
three and around twenty staff members who are mostly rangers, but also includes some
relatives from a nearby town who are employed as contract musterers. As well as cattle, Fish
Creek is one of the areas on which this ranger group engages in land management activities.
Fish Creek receives funding from the Indigenous Land Corporation, and benefits from the
workforce of the rangers who rely on both State and Federal government funding. As such,
Fish Creek does not operate as an independent cattle concern and does not make a substantial
profit from selling cattle. Despite this, the station is a deep source of pride for Sammy and
Duane. One afternoon, as we were sitting on the veranda of a building at Fish Creek called
the ‘old house’, Duane reeled off the list of improvements that he, Sammy and the rangers
had undertaken to the station. Duane described the station as being in a state of dire disrepair
when it was first handed back to Aboriginal traditional owners. Sammy chuckled,
remembering that a bull was actually living inside the old house at that time, the doors having
been left permanently open after the previous owners vacated. Duane and Sammy’s
comments about the labour they had invested in Fish Creek mirrored my discussion with Bill
and Diane, which I described earlier. In emphasising how they had made improvements to

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the infrastructure of the station, Duane and Sammy seemed to have adopted some version of
the pioneer complex (Furniss 1997) that is common among settler-descended graziers.
However, enterprises like Fish Creek which rely on government funding and do not turn a
profit related to the sale of cattle are positioned by settler-descended graziers as set up to fail.
Graziers frequently frame such initiatives as unsuccessful in order to mount a critique of
government interventions that they see as taking workable land away from private industry
that may be able to use the land profitably and providing little tangible sustainable benefit for
Aboriginal people. Indeed, there is much that can be criticised about government-led
initiatives that encourage Aboriginal people to engage in a grazing industry that has been
deemed by many to be not economically viable in Cape York. As Neale (2017) has pointed
out, Cape York is incredibly marginal grazing country and those cattle stations that have been
able to survive economically frequently only support a single family and have diversified
their operations with tourism and road building ventures, rather than relying on the sale of
cattle alone. In recent years, many grazing families have been forced to sell their stations
because they can no longer make a living from cattle in the region.
Perhaps more tellingly, aside from a reliance on government-funding, settler-descended
graziers tend to frame these stations as having failed because, in the graziers’ eyes, they have
done little to help foster or encourage a habit and valuation of hard work among young
Aboriginal people. One grazier told me that she believes that these kinds of initiatives are ‘set
up to fail’ because enterprises are ‘handed’ to Aboriginal people, without Aboriginal people
needing to invest their labour in the establishment of these initiatives. Such a perspective is
not generally based on direct observation or experience, but rather emerges out of the set of
values that graziers hold about labour and land; the aforementioned pioneer complex.

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To these graziers, part of the issue lies in the form of land-tenure that Aboriginal people are
being handed back. Most of the Aboriginal cattle stations in Cape York are Aboriginal
freehold, which means that the land is held communally by a land trust or Aboriginal
corporation and cannot be bought, sold or subdivided. This situation means that sometimes
multiple family groups share responsibility for the same property, which sometimes results in
a kind of inertia as people try to achieve consensus. A number of these stations in Cape York
do not have anyone living on them year-round, and do not operate as profitable commercial
cattle concerns; a situation keenly observed by graziers. The diversity of other forms of work
and land management that are carried out on these stations by Aboriginal traditional owners
and ranger groups, such as weed control, invasive species management, wetland
conservation, and implementing fire regimes, are rarely acknowledged by graziers.
Importantly, graziers describe the ‘handing over’ of these already set-up enterprises as
resulting in a lack of pride, which – to the graziers - then translates to a lack of valuing hard
work. One grazier reflected to me that, ‘the government’s got a lot to answer for. Or maybe
do-gooders, I’m not sure who.’
The generalisations about Aboriginal stations by graziers tend to be based on a few specific
examples with which the graziers are familiar; normally neighbouring stations that have
fallen into disrepair after being handed back to traditional owners. Such generalisations,
though, are put to work in allowing graziers to broadly criticise various government-measures
intended to assist Aboriginal people, while assuming a position of benevolent and
paternalistic concern. As I discuss below, graziers tend to have vastly different perceptions of
the point of government-funded ranger programs than the Aboriginal Traditional Owners
who run and take part in ranger work. These differences reveal the divergent perceptions
these groups hold of what counts as ‘work’.

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Graziers, perhaps unwittingly, are tapping into a broader discourse of deficit and failure that
has been used by various political figures, right-wing think tanks and media outlets to discuss
Aboriginal people and, in particular, policies around self-determination. Many of these
critiques attack land rights as something which has contributed to unemployment and
facilitated welfare dependency (Austin-Broos 2011). Austin-Broos notes that many of these
critiques of land rights and remote communities tend to ignore cultural difference and any
form of local competence, describing remote communities and their inhabitants as an
undifferentiated ‘bundle of mere lack’ (2011, 98). Graziers, too, seem to frame the
establishment of Aboriginal-owned stations and the transfer of pastoral lease into Aboriginal
freehold as a kind of ‘failed experiment’ that has not instilled a valuation of hard work in
young Aboriginal people. By levelling some blame at ‘do gooders’, as Diane does, graziers
seem to be criticising not only government intervention, but also the policy shift towards self-
determination as something that urban-based people, disconnected from the realities of life in
Cape York, have advocated for.
For graziers, this critique of government intervention is woven into a broader distrust towards
land rights ostensibly based on two moral concerns: that land tenure changes may lead to
poorly managed land, and; that land tenure changes have provided little material benefit for
Aboriginal people. Both of these claims can be dismissed as unfounded by evidence of
successful land management programs and by evidence of widespread employment of local
Aboriginal people in the ranger industry – but the fact that these claims are made reveals
much about the kinds of work that graziers value. Sullivan argues that the discourse of failure
around self- determination should be challenged ‘first, because it is set against a false ‘golden
age’, when Aborigines were happy and knew their place; second, because many gains were
made during the self-determination period’ (2013, 360). These same falsehoods are evident in

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the way that graziers discuss work ethics in Aboriginal people as apparent during the station
times and lacking in the present day.
Divergent values of paid work: race, gender and class
It is mid-morning, and I am sitting under a broken windmill with settler-descended grazier
Tina at Horseshoe Station. We are waiting for Morgan, Tina’s husband, to duck back to the
house to pick up some putty which, as has become apparent, is a necessary component for
fixing the windmill. Tina is younger than Morgan, somewhere in her forties. She wears the
preferred uniform of Cape York station women: a faded and torn once-brightly-coloured
work-shirt, canvas shorts and rubber clogs. Normally quiet and reserved, Tina has by now
warmed to me enough to surrender to my persistent attempts to engage her in conversation.
She recalls when they used to have Aboriginal men from the nearby town out to work on the
station, helping out with the muster for a few months at a time. ‘We don’t really do it
anymore though,’ she tells me. When I ask why, she replies that it is harder to find people
who want the work. ‘The ones who want to work mostly have jobs with the rangers, Parks or
[Department of Primary Industries] now.’ She explains to me that a lot of these ranger jobs
for Aboriginal Land Trusts have only appeared over the last decade or so. Tina tells me about
phoning a man who had previously worked for them to see if he was interested in some work.
‘He has kids now, and he told me he can get more money from the dole4 than he could
working for us, so, he thinks, why wouldn’t he just stay home with the kids?’ Tina tells me.
The belief that Aboriginal people ‘don’t want to work’ is common among graziers and
indicates that graziers only understand certain kinds of activities to count as ‘work’, while
again being based mostly on second-hand anecdotal reports, rather than emerging from the
direct observations or experiences of graziers. Austin- Broos (2006) suggests that Aboriginal
4 Government assistance

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people may conceive of different and multiple kinds of work. She draws a distinction among
her Arrernte research participants between ‘working for’ kin by attending to relationships and
fulfilling obligations, and ‘working’ for waged labour. These distinctions between different
kinds of work provide a framework for understanding how Aboriginal labour is positioned
differently by settler-descended graziers and Aboriginal workers themselves.
Morgan and Tina’s assumption that Aboriginal people ‘don’t want to work’ is fortified by
their observations (at a distance) of the way that Aboriginal ranger groups carry out tasks.
The way that graziers articulate these observations reveal the implicit criteria by which they
value certain types of work as valid and others as invalid, or ‘not work’. Because a particular
ranger group spends some of the year working on Horseshoe Station as it is part of their area
of traditional connection over which they have Native Title rights, Morgan and Tina are
occasionally able to observe their activities. Over a cup of tea, Morgan expressed to me his
belief that a lot of the ‘young ones’ with ranger jobs do not have ‘much of a work ethic’.
Morgan and Tina’s main evidence for this claim is based on how this ranger group organises
their work programs. Teams of four or five rangers often attend to tasks that Morgan and
Tina suggest could be achieved by one or two people. ‘If it was private enterprise, that way of
working would mean the enterprise would go bust in no time,’ Morgan asserted to me. ‘But
because it is a hand-out style workforce, it’s able to continue’.
Morgan’s perspective reveals an implicit bias towards individualism, by which he sees the
number of people involved in work tasks as minimising the work that is being done. From the
perspective of the managers of the ranger group, their priorities are to provide employment
for community members, to provide skills and competencies training for young people, and
to get people ‘working on country’. The communal nature of the ranger group’s work ensures
that more senior rangers spend time with those who are junior, and alongside learning

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practical skills related to fencing or natural resource management, the senior rangers tend to
informally impart important cultural and environmental knowledge as they move through
their country. The nature of the work is more holistic than how it is conceived by the graziers,
who base their assessment of whether or not the work is successful on tangible outcomes, like
the number of kilometres of fencing erected per day. Despite graziers frequently articulating
their own experiences of learning about bush resources and stories from older Aboriginal
stockmen in the mustering camp in their youth, they tend not to think about the significance
of this kind of on-country learning for the young rangers – many of whom grew up in town
and are getting to know their country for the first time.
The Aboriginal ranger industry can be understood as part of what Altman (2001) has called
the ‘customary economy’. In his highly influential work, which espoused the concept of the
hybrid economy, Altman (2001; 2007) suggested that economic wellbeing for remote-living
Aboriginal communities could be achieved through a combination of the market economy
(waged labour for private industry), the welfare economy (government assistance, including
schemes like the CDEP), and the customary economy, which comprises of a variety of
subsistence and land management activities, among others. To Altman (2003), instituting
payment for environmental services – like through Aboriginal ranger programs – has the
potential to improve both socio-economic outcomes for remote-living Aboriginal people and
biodiversity outcomes across the wide-ranging Indigenous estate. As Altman, Buchanan and
Larsen write, ‘Indigenous ranger programs are a standout success in a long history of failed
Indigenous labour market programs in remote Australia’ (2007, p. 36-37). Payment for
environmental services is a way of connecting the customary economy with both government
funding and private industry (Altman, Buchanan & Larsen, 2007). This can be seen in Cape
York through government-funded ranger programs and through northern Australia’s carbon

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sequestration scheme, in which landholders and managers receive payment from private
industry for their fire management work (Russell-Smith et al, 2013; Reardon-Smith, 2023).
Morgan’s comments fundamentally misunderstand the logic of Aboriginal ranger groups and
echo critiques by various media outlets and think-tanks such as the Bennelong Society around
the now-defunct Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) which Austin-
Broos (2011) has discussed. CDEP was conceived as a form of ‘workfare’ at the behest of
various Aboriginal elders who called for employment schemes in remote areas with no labour
markets that comprised something more productive than just ‘sit down money’. However,
very few participants in the CDEP transitioned to mainstream full- time employment, leading
to disillusionment in which many participants received their pay without fulfilling their
mutual obligations (Musharbash, 2004). This resulted in critics of the scheme branding it as
nothing more than welfare and arguing that it would produce ‘dependency’ (Austin-Broos
2011, 16, 119-120). Morgan’s comments seem to indicate that he sees ranger work as a
similar kind of quasi-welfare, where rangers are not subjected to the same obligations and
expectations as in private enterprise. Thus, in Morgan’s eyes, what he would construe as a
positive relationship to work is not fostered in this context.
Reflecting for a moment, though, Morgan told me that in the past he had worked with a team
of rangers from this same ranger group to put in a fenceline and that it had gone well. ‘If
those young ones are given enough direction, a lot of them are happy to work,’ he said.
Morgan seems to consider the lack of a recognisable work ethic among younger Aboriginal
people as a result of a ‘hand-out style’ work program and a lack of clear direction, rather than
a pathological or entrenched part of Aboriginal culture. This is perhaps unsurprising given
Morgan’s mostly positive experiences working alongside older Aboriginal people in his
youth. Many graziers’ discussions of work ethics, though articulated in a way that is highly

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racialized, indicated a similar position; one in which what they see as a lack of valuing ‘hard
work’ is mobilised in a broader critique of Aboriginal land rights, welfare and royalties,
rather than solely based in racist assumptions or cultural stereotyping. In a lot of ways this
critique is also generational, and entwined with the nostalgia that graziers feel for the ‘golden
era’ of pre-Equal Wages grazing, during which graziers’ connections to the region and social
standing were stable and unthreatened.
Anthropologists in Australia and elsewhere have described how what may appear to be a
disinclination to work among marginalised people can, in fact, be related to structural and
cultural factors. Austin-Broos (2006) points out that many anthropologists have posited that
Aboriginal people have responded to rapid social and cultural change by ‘hunting and
gathering’ welfare in similar ways to how rations were used in the past. Austin-Broos (2006)
also discusses a distinct kind of work among her Arrernte interlocutors in Central Australia.
She describes this as ‘working for’ kin and fulfilling obligations around reciprocity. Austin-
Broos writes that, ‘Arrernte, far from being simply in or outside market society, have drawn
on established forms of relatedness in order to respond to structures imposed on them’ (2006,
13). This theme is echoed in studies by McRae-Williams and Gerritsen (2010) and Burbank
(2006). In each of these contexts, waged labour is drawn into an existing system of work
which is about fulfilling responsibilities to kin. Importantly, for many of the Aboriginal
people I worked with in Cape York, a great deal of time and energy is expended on the
political work required for the governance of land that has been handed back through the
Native Title Act (1993). For some people, this work includes payment – such as the sitting
fees that board members of Aboriginal corporations are paid to attend meetings. Yet, aside
from paid meetings there is constant work on the maintenance of relations and important
conversations that happen among and between families about the management of
communally held land and resources.

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Povinelli (1993), too, points out that what counts as productive labour can differ between
Aboriginal and settler-descended Australians. She writes that Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal
Australians are
...engaged in a political struggle over the interpretation of their labour and over the
use and development of regional lands based upon what they produce. Each
emphasises a different productive benefit. Euro-Australians produce commodities and
thereby the wealth of nations and peoples; Aborigines produce the cultural and
economic wellbeing of country and people (Povinelli 1993, 192).
Povinelli’s point aligns with the priority of the Aboriginal ranger groups to get young people
‘working on country’. Grazier Morgan’s comments do not indicate an awareness of such a
priority, or the way that this kind of work ties into the political work that Cape York
Aboriginal people have been engaging in through land claims processes and subsequent
management of communally held land. Instead, Morgan’s comments indicate a critique of
government support and intervention that is similar to grazier criticisms of Aboriginal
freehold and cattle stations. His description of ranger work as ‘hand out style’ indicates that
he sees only labour that results in a profit as real work. His repeated assertions that this style
of work program would never exist in 'private industry’ operate as a critique of government
support. The substance of this critique is largely that this kind of work program fails to instil
the necessary habits, qualities and rigour around ‘hard work’ that are so highly valued by
Morgan and other settler-descended graziers; a relationship to work that Morgan understands
the pastoral industry to have instilled in older Aboriginal people. Ranger work to Morgan,
then, is part of a nexus of government supported initiatives that, in his mind, fail to translate
to tangible benefits for Aboriginal people. While Morgan’s comments indicate a lack of
understanding of the purpose of initiatives like the investment in Aboriginal ranger groups,

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they also indicate how he frames and values particular kinds of work as worthwhile, while
denigrating others.
Conclusion
Graziers employ a kind of nostalgia in their comparison of before and after the introduction
of Equal Wages that is couched in terms of concern for the un- and under-employment and
associated social problems that Aboriginal people in Cape York have experienced, alongside
‘unhelpful’ government intervention. For graziers, the era of widespread Aboriginal
employment in the pastoral industry was also the time in which their livelihoods and sense of
connection to the region were secure – before the proliferation of National Parks and the
transfer of land to Aboriginal ownership as the result of land rights legislation.
Graziers place a high degree of value on certain forms of work that are not just related to
productivity under capitalism but, in a more substantive way, are related to how graziers have
forged a sense of belonging in Cape York. Physical hard work is considered valuable by
settler-descended graziers because of how it links them to the land and their sense of self,
aligning with what Furniss (1997) has described as a ‘pioneer complex’. For graziers, the
importance of labouring on the land cannot be understated, as it is through such mixing of
sweat with the soil (Jackson 2006; Garbutt 2011) that graziers have developed a relationship
to Cape York. Belonging, livelihoods and labour are entwined for settler-descended graziers
in such a way that the current era of government funding, conservation regimes, and
Aboriginal land rights is uncomfortable to grapple with.
Graziers generate critiques around work where they see an absence of these valued forms of
work and an associated work ethic. In their comments about work ethics, graziers are

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critiquing perceived government overreach, which they see as having deleterious effects for
Aboriginal people. Government support through the funding of ranger programs and
Aboriginal-owned cattle stations are positioned by graziers as creating ‘hand-out style’ jobs
that do not instil the values around ‘hard work’ that are prized so highly by graziers. As such,
the domain of paid work emerges as a site in which belonging and authority over land can be
contested.
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