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I am Lorenzo Veracini. I am Associate Professor in History at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.

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And I am Editor In Chief of a scholarly journal entitled Settler Colonial Studies. What a good question. And what a loaded question.

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This is probably why the Frontier Life collection is useful in the first place. Answering it is not easy, primarily because frontier can mean many things

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in many different contexts. And it means different things in different intellectual traditions. So answering is not easy.

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A frontier is when two social political collectives end up occupying the same space after invasion or displacement. But frontier also means a situation in which the two social political collectives are not equal,

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are not characterised by the same ability to control processes in the area they are sharing with their counterparts. Frontier can refer to a line, a border between two polities,

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or to an area, sometimes a vast area. And this makes a big difference because once the borders of a polity are set, you can have processes of cultural homogenisation and these are usually

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called internal colonialists. But once the frontier is moving, you have different processes in which difference is reduced and cultural homogeneity is produced

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as the border is moved. Frontier processes turn one thing into another, a bunch of settlers into the constituent collective of a national polity,

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a land into something else, and character can also be transformed by frontier processes. What's important to emphasise here is that frontier is inevitably an ideologically loaded term

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and as such, many historians have called for discontinuing its use. On the other hand, precisely because frontier can mean different things in different contexts,

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the notion of a frontier has to retain its importance and analysis of frontiers keep propping up. Frontier also refers to, especially to, the history of the United States.

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One important development in the studies of frontiers is that many historians have adopted the term for their own national historiographies. So for example, in Australia, the frontier

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means something entirely different from what it means in the US. And this is why a global collection like Frontier Life is important, because it enables the comparative analysis

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of frontiers, and it enables some thinking about frontier processes in ways that are detached from focusing exclusively on the United States.

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Well, the study of history should be related to the understanding of the present. Frontiers have made the present. The notion of a frontier is still

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very important to the present because in many ways, in the settler societies, the frontier has never gone away. The political relationships that were established during the frontier were not

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superseded in later years. And because frontier can be used flexibly, frontier still retains an important balance in the political discourse of the settler societies.

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So thinking about frontiers enables the comparative analysis of the settler societies, and this has proved a very fruitful approach. But the study of the frontier is also useful because it

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highlights what should have been done and wasn't. Frontiers were often very destructive of the environment, and the lessons of the frontiers, especially when things went pear-shaped

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during the Dust Bowl and in other circumstances, is a very urgent lesson for the present. The other reason why studying frontiers could prove fruitful, it is important to understand

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what happened and what shouldn't have happened, but what happened in the frontiers of settlement is also important because there were avenues that were not taken.

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Treaties were signed and not honoured and the possibility of co-existing on frontiers was somewhere tried, even if not pursued in a substantial way. So studying different theories is useful

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for the avenues that were not taken as well as for what was done. I think it is very significant. Frontiers happen in many continents and the frontiers

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of settlement shaped the world during the age of what New Zealand historian, James Belich, called the Age of the Settler Revolution. This is a global process and the expansion of capitalism

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was interweaved with it. This is a global process also because the settler societies are currently all over the place. Settlers reshaped landscapes, reshaped relationships,

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displaced indigenous peoples and polities, and the legacy of these processes is still with us. And the legacy of these processes, it is global. The short answer is no.

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They should be reviewed with many lenses, but the study of colonisation is very important to the understanding of frontier societies because colonialism is one of the many unequal relationships.

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There are many available unequal relationships, there's racism, there's sexism, there's ageism, and there's all sorts of ways in which relationships between humans could be made unequal.

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Colonialism is one, and what happens in frontiers is that the people that come from the outside are able to exercise their domination over people that are indigenous to the place.

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Middle grounds, situations in which relationships remain equal or roughly equal, or even controlled by an indigenous party, are rare and are unsustainable through times.

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They were there, we have historical examples of middle grounds, but they became extinct during the age of the global revolution. So colonialism shouldn't be the only lens,

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but colonialism should definitely be one of the lenses in which we understand frontier processes. Without inequality, without violence, without displacement, without subjection, without containment, there

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are no frontiers and there is no way that frontier processes can run their course. Colonialism should be one of the lenses in which we look at frontier processes.

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As I mentioned earlier, the frontier is, in many ways, still with us. Relationships between settler and indigenous collectives are still unequal.

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In that case, in this case, understanding frontiers can really help understanding the present and what is that still shapes relationships in an unequal way.

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Ideological representations of the frontier insists that the frontier passes, the frontier is closed, that the frontier is no longer with us. What a collection like Frontier Life can do

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is to pinpoint the ways in which we can understand frontier process, still operative today. Well, in my estimation, they are two very different modes of domination.

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They mix on the ground, they are always interweaved, but they are not the same thing. Colonialism is the domination of an exogenous party over an indigenous body or over an imported exogenous

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party and its domination for the purpose of exploitation. Chattel slavery is a classic example of colonialism. Settler colonialism is different, because settler colonialism aims to displace indigenous people,

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it doesn't rely on indigenous people. And as such, it thrives on the disappearance of indigenous people in a way in which colonialism doesn't. It relates also to the ways in which

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these regimes are discontinued. Colonialism is usually discontinued with the departure of the colonising parties. There is independence, one flag is lowered,

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a post-colonial flag is raised, and post-colonial independence begins. Settler colonialism is different because settler colonialism is much more difficult to discontinue.

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And one reason why we should study frontiers is also to understand ways in which we can get out of an unequal relationship that endures and is ongoing. Settler colonialism aims to discontinue

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indigenous presences but it is rarely successful. Indigenous people have survived the age of frontier, the age of the settler revolution, and their claims to sovereignty and to cultural integrity

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and cultural set determination, and autonomy are still there. So in a way, the study of the frontier is the study of a process that was successful in some ways and unsuccessful in others.

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That's why the study of the frontier is very important today.