Encountering the Horse: Initial reactions of Aboriginal Australians to a domesticated animal

Abstract

The Global to the Local within an Aglo-Saxon Mindset, there is a tendency to speak and think of animals, such as the horse, as distinct entities. In the following narrative, however, the horse is crucially inter-linked with humans and the guns they carried; the strange and unknown humans they encountered; the buffalo the horse assisted to hunt down; and the diseases and parasites horses carried within them. Encounters with the horse provide an entry point into a cross-cultural and cross-species landscape on the colonial frontier of northern Australia.