Frontiers are continually progressing movements of human beings, usually sweeping aside other human beings before them. They are a naked confrontation between those who were already there and those who have newly arrived. As frontiers move, those on either side of them come into a form of mobile contact and, almost inevitably, conflict, as the pioneering or colonising group moves ever deeper into the territory of those who own the land. Outlaw hero traditions frequently erupt on both sides of these often intangible but fraught lines of demarcation, and ride the physical and the cultural spaces that lie between them. Colonial frontiers are a form of border, though their boundaries are either fixed or oscillating between one or more sides as people move across them, probing, skirmishing, smuggling, and fleeing. While they may be pushed one way or another from time to time, they rarely involve major movements of territory. Nevertheless, they are often the physical markers of social, economic and political ruptures along which tensions mount from either side and across which conflicts may be fought out. Underneath these often violent confrontations between the old and the new, the colonised and the colonisers lay the same concern – who will own the land and control whatever resources it may possess?