Although the wood is of no value as timber (except to drive away mosquitoes when burnt), the fruit is tasty and full of potassium tartrate, tartaric acid, and vitamin C. The leaves, roots, and gum are also edible, as is the sprout of a young tree, which can be eaten like asparagus. Indigenous peoples have lived with boabs for millennia, taking the seed pods from camp to camp, playing a crucial role in their evolution and distribution across the north-west of Australia. People learnt to make rope and nets from the fibrous bark, and glue from the pollen. They converted trunks into watercrafts, and painted and engraved others for spiritual and ceremonial purposes. They imbued these remarkable trees with story, transforming them into vessels of memory and lore.

My companion, historian and archaeologist Darrell Lewis, presses himself against the trunk of the boab, arms outstretched. He moves in this way around the tree, using his arm span to estimate its girth: some fifty feet in circumference, we calculate, or sixteen metres. Perhaps thirty metres tall. Darrell has been here many times and has systematically photographed, traced, measured, and mapped every marking on this boab, most of which were carved during the 1890s. ‘It’s the most heavily marked historic boab I have ever encountered,’ he tells me. He points out the familiar carved names of cattle men, duffers, drovers, and other frontier opportunists. There are also more enigmatic markings: crosses, hearts, and emu tracks; a boxer swinging a punch; a rider on his horse; a hand and forearm decorated in the style of west Arnhem Land rock art; the name ‘Café Francais’. The markings are evocative of life on the early cattle stations, the banter and mobility of the workers, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, and the increasing familiarity and connections across cultures.

Among all the markings, it is the ominous name before me that stands out. Retribution Camp. Retribution for what? What sinister event is intimated by this name? The tree attends to my questions silently. Nearby, Retribution Creek runs past Retribution Bore.

A boab tree bearing the words 'Retribution Camp' (photograph by Darrell Lewis)

Since my arrival in the region a few days earlier, frontier violence has been at the fore of our minds. Darrell and I have been surveying a part of the range south of Jasper Gorge, searching for the site of a massacre where as many as sixty people are said to have been killed. The event is known through Indigenous oral histories, a few secondary accounts, and an annotated 1890s newspaper clipping. But much of the story remains shrouded in silence. Darrell has identified the probable perpetrators and drawn together the documentation of the attack in his book A Wild History: Life and death on the Victoria River frontier (2012), but he has yet to firmly locate the site. Big Mick Kangkinang, regarded as ‘the man who knew everything’, pointed Darrell towards the rough location, but, as I quickly learn, the process of ‘groundtruthing’ is slow and arduous.

Our unusual mission has elicited many impromptu conversations about the frontier. Over a cup of tea one morning, a couple of cattlemen related a dozen historical accounts of violence against Aboriginal people in the district and elsewhere: beatings, shootings, poisonings, and large-scale massacres. As the late Deborah Bird Rose wrote in her landmark book, Hidden Histories (1991), ‘violence and bloodshed, invariably ruthless and sometimes orgiastic in their excesses, were key features’ of the Victoria River frontier, as was resistance. The stories are as shocking in their brutality as they are in their frequency. They involve characters such as the second manager at Victoria River Downs, Jack Watson, who once asked the local constable, W.H. Willshire, to procure a particular Indigenous man’s skull for him, so that he could use it for a spittoon. Like many settlers in the VRD, Watson cultivated a reputation for being ‘hard on blacks’. When he was at Lawn Hill, he was known for having on his station ‘40 prs of black’s ears nailed round the walls, collected during raiding parties after the loss of many cattle speared by the blacks’.

Officially, there was no war in the Victoria River District. Nor were there treaties. While the government deemed dispossession to be legitimate, it could not endorse the violent force used to seize the land, so a curious language of denial emerged on the frontier. Historian Bain Attwood has interrogated this denial in its historic and contemporary forms, noting how settlers often projected ‘their own savagery onto the Aboriginal people’ to ‘blame them for most of the violence that occurred or excuse their own violence in the name of the civilization they claimed for themselves’. At the heart of the denial were acts of othering. Women, men, and children became ‘gins’, ‘myalls’, and ‘piccaninnies’. Violence, when recorded, was coded as ‘dispersing the blacks’, ‘quieting down the blacks’ – or, simply, ‘retribution’. Deborah Bird Rose described how, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, parts of the Victoria River District became known as ‘quiet nigger’ country and ‘bad nigger’ country: ‘What Europeans called “bad nigger” country was country in which Aboriginal people were able to resist invasion.’

The war was waged over a generation; the frontier lasted a century. Keeping quiet, destroying evidence, hiding in euphemisms: these were part of the culture on the cattle stations. G.W. Broughton observed ‘a freemasonry of silence’ during his trip from the Kimberley to Darwin in 1908. When outsiders came to the region, locals ‘kept their mouths shut’. Crimes turned into whispers that eventually became too soft to hear.

Darrell has been listening to these stories from both sides of the frontier since he first came to the region in 1971. He weighs them up carefully, testing them for accuracy, parsing the tall tales from the ‘hidden histories’. He often turns to what he describes as ‘the outback archive’ to verify or enrich an account: the histories imprinted in the land, such as inscribed water tanks, engraved cattle skulls, and ‘living documents’ like marked boabs. Sometimes bullet shells are all that are needed to confirm a story. ‘If there’s just one shell in remote country,’ he tells me, ‘then perhaps it’s some lone fella having a shot at a wallaby for dinner. But if there are dozens, even hundreds, far from a stockyard, a hut site or an old track, in an area where other sources suggest a massacre occurred, then I would take that as pretty firm evidence that it was the site of a massacre.’ So far he hasn’t found this ‘firm evidence’ for the massacre south of Jasper Gorge.

Darrell has compiled many of these stories into an epic book, officially launched in Darwin on 5 June 2019. He calls it The Victoria River District Doomsday Book (National Centre for Biography, ANU, 2018). It is a compendium of historical information he has accumulated over decades – from documentary sources, oral history, rock art, and the ‘outback archive’. It is ordered according to the cattle stations in the district, with details of the lives of the station managers, annual numbers of livestock, as well as notable events, such as fires, floods, thefts, spearings, and massacres. It is a vast, sprawling web of memory about the region and its characters. And it features the backstories of some of the names carved into the Retribution Camp boab.

One of the immense boabs at 'Retribution Camp' (photograph by Darrell Lewis)

Over the past few years, a team of researchers at the University of Newcastle, led by historian Lyndall Ryan, has been methodically collecting testimony of colonial massacres, corroborating the evidence, and plotting the locations on a map of Australia. Hundreds of entries now dot the continent, like wounds on the landscape. The project has had remarkable success in drawing national and international attention to this torrid history. It presents black-and-white evidence of a confronting and bloody truth. Yet so much of this history remains grey.

Whatever events are alluded to at the Retribution Camp boab will not find their way onto the massacre map. The carved name rests in the realm of suggestion. It is a fragment, a clue. There is no known historical account or oral history of a ‘punitive expedition’ in the immediate area. This boab appears to stand testimony to an otherwise undocumented event during the long period of warfare between the Aboriginal people and early settlers. ‘It’s where the punitive expedition must have camped,’ Darrell reflects, ‘not where they shot people, but where they camped.’ Perhaps this was the last place the men spoke of their acts of ‘retribution’. Perhaps carving the name was a bonding experience, a compact of complicity. ‘The strategy of silence,’ Rose observes, ‘was maintained through, and reinforced, white mateship in the bush.’

I gaze up at the boab, this beautiful old tree signed with the suggestion of bloodshed. How many generations has this tree been witness to? How many thousands of people have camped beneath it? It’s hard to say. Boabs can live for millennia, but they are unlike most other trees. There are no regular annual rings to count, and size is not always a good indicator of age. They are the world’s largest stem succulent. Some trees grow tall, others stay squat. All fluctuate during their lives according to their water content. And they are amazingly resilient. Once mature, their moisture-rich wood makes them virtually fire resistant. Boabs toppled in storms, with their shallow roots exposed, can resprout and grow, spreadeagled, for centuries.

At some point in time, without warning, a boab ceases to be a boab. Its once strong trunk collapses inwards and the soft fibrous wood bleaches and erodes into the wind. As Penny Miller records of the South African baobab: ‘When the tree dies the process is Othello-like – a pillar of Herculean strength and nobility, disintegrates into a mound of pulp.’ While a red gum remains a part of its ecosystem long after its death – perhaps for as long as it did in life – a boab’s demise is frighteningly instant. It dies, withers, and collapses within a year.

A tree that may have lived for some one thousand years, maybe more, a constant in a time of dramatic change, disintegrates in a few short months, like paper turning to dust. The living document dies, taking with it the history it once preserved. All that remains is a shallow scar in the earth where the giant once stood.