The homestead as fortress: fact or folklore?

Abstract

Houses are quintessential statements of identity, encoding elements of personal and social attitudes, aspirations and realities. As functional containers for human life, they reflect the exigencies of their construction and occupation, as well as the alterations that ensued as contexts, occupants and uses changed. As older houses endure into subsequent social contexts, they become drawn into later symbolic landscapes, connoting both past and present social relationships simultaneously and connecting the two via the many ways they are understood and represented in the present. As historical archaeologist Anne Yentsch has argued: ‘Many cultural values, including ideas about power relationships and social inequality, are expressed within the context of the stories surrounding houses’.1 This paper is one attempt to investigate the stories surrounding a ruined pastoral homestead in central northern Queensland in light of relationships between non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal people on the frontier.