Abstract
The essay analyses commemorations of the colonial period in the Federation art and architectural program of the Purrumbete homestead (1840–1902), a country house near Camperdown in the western district of Victoria. Using Aboriginal Protectorate and judicial archives, it reconstructs Purrumbete's early spatial and racial frontier relationships in order to reinterpret the Federation depiction of colonial Purrumbete. The 1901–1902 rebuilding and mural works produced coded signs of a violent frontier past. The bloody nature of the colonial encounter surfaced in Purrumbete's Federation representation as a set of symptoms: “suddenly manifested knots of association or conflicted meaning”.1 This paper brings new archival documents to light, re-reading the oral and painted accounts of the homestead's origin, and concludes by arguing for the importance of repressed, illegible, and cryptic evidence in cultural representations of frontier history.
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