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The announcement of S. Kidman & Co's intention to sell their pastoral business and 11 leases marks a new waypoint in South Australia's progress towards a post-colonial world. From the time when Sidney Kidman first cohabitated the bush with Billy the Aboriginal to the agistment of stock in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara-Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in 2014, Kidman's history has been interwoven with Indigenous Australia. Not surprisingly the announcement has sparked interest across Indigenous social networks. The company's success has generated spectacular interest ever since Kidman's first Kapunda horse sale in 1900. Kidman's biographers Idriess (1936) and Bowen (1987) provide fairly romantic pictures of the man and his early colonial success, which can be corroborated in Aboriginal accounts. Kidman relied on good judgement of people, animals and land. At a time when others in industry were struggling to affirm terra nullius and Social Darwinism as necessities in the settler legal fiction, Kidman was recruiting indigenous "boundary riders" in places with no boundaries, branding cleanskin cattle and ensuring flows of cattle were heading to market. |
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