Long History, Deep Time

LONG HISTORY, DEEP TIME DEEPENING HISTORIES OF PLACE Aboriginal History Incorporated Aboriginal History Inc. is a part of the Australian Centre for Indigenous History, Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University, and gratefully acknowledges the support of the School of History and the National Centre for Indigenous Studies, The Australian National University. Aboriginal History Inc. is administered by an Editorial Board which is responsible for all unsigned material. Views and opinions expressed by the author are not necessarily shared by Board members. Contacting Aboriginal History All correspondence should be addressed to the Editors, Aboriginal History Inc., ACIH, School of History, RSSS, 9 Fellows Road (Coombs Building), Acton, ANU, 2601, or [email protected]. WARNING: Readers are notified that this publication may contain names or images of deceased persons. LONG HISTORY, DEEP TIME DEEPENING HISTORIES OF PLACE Edited by Ann McGrath and Mary Anne Jebb Published by ANU Press and Aboriginal History Inc. The Australian National University Acton ACT 2601, Australia Email: [email protected] This title is also available online at http://press.anu.edu.au National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Title: Long history, deep time : deepening histories of place / edited by Ann McGrath, Mary Anne Jebb. ISBN: 9781925022520 (paperback) 9781925022537 (ebook) Subjects: Aboriginal Australians--History. Australia--History. Other Creators/Contributors: McGrath, Ann, editor. Jebb, Mary Anne, editor. Dewey Number: 994.0049915 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Cover design and layout by ANU Press. Cover photograph by Kartikeya Sharma. Printed by Griffin Press This edition © 2015 ANU Press and Aboriginal History Inc. Contents Illustrations . vii Foreword . ix Preface: ‘The gift of history’ . xi Acknowledgements . xvii Contributors . xxi 1 . Deep Histories in Time, or Crossing the Great Divide? . 1 Ann McGrath 2 . Tjukurpa Time . 33 Diana James 3 . Contemporary Concepts of Time in Western Science and Philosophy . 47 Peter J. Riggs 4 . The Mutability of Time and Space as a Means of Healing History in an Australian Aboriginal Community . 67 Rob Paton 5 . Arnhem Land to Adelaide . 83 Karen Hughes 6 . Categories of ‘Old’ and ‘New’ in Western Arnhem Land Bark Painting . 101 Luke Taylor 7 . Dispossession is a Legitimate Experience . 119 Peter Read 8 . Lingering Inheritance . 133 Julia Torpey Hurst 9 . Historyless People . 151 Jeanine Leane 10 . Panara . 163 Bruce Pascoe 11 . The Past in the Present? . 171 Harry Allen 12 . Lives and Lines . 203 Martin Porr Long History, Deep Time 13 . The Archaeology of the Willandra . 221 Nicola Stern 14 . Collaborative Histories of the Willandra Lakes . 241 Malcolm Allbrook and Ann McGrath Illustrations Figure 1 .1: Visitors and friends from the Willandra Lakes World Heritage region at The Australian National University in June 2013 . 19 Figure 4 .1: Map of northern Australia showing places mentioned in the text . 69 Figure 4 .2: Nuggett Collins Japarta making boomerangs for the winnun exchange, circa June 1986 . 75 Figure 4 .3: The bundles of ochred boomerangs ready for exchange, circa June 1986 . 76 Figure 4 .4: The winnun exchange taking place at Yarralin Aboriginal community, circa July 1986 . One of the bundles of boomerangs is in the foreground and the bamboo spears are tied to the roof of the truck . 77 Figure 5 .1: Devil Devil, Djambu Burra Burra (1937–2005), 2001 . 87 Figure 5 .2: Warndarrang elder Rosalind Munur points to the three Catfish tors that guard the entrance to Burrunju, 1984 . Also in the photograph is Ngukurr elder Dawson Daniels . 89 Figure 5 .3: Warndarrang elder Ngangigee, Cara Thompson, late 1930s . 89 Figure 5 .4: Warndarrang elder Ruth Cook, Mungranjyajua, Katherine, Northern Territory, 2006 . 91 Figure 5 .5: Ngarrindjeri elder Aunty Inez Jean Birt, the Coorong, South Australia, 2002 . 95 Figure 6 .1: A kangaroo painted in x-ray style, Gaagudju people, western Arnhem Land, 1994 . .. 103 Figure 6 .2: A yam painted with diamond patterns, Oenpelli, western Arnhem Land, 1994 . .. 107 Figure 6 .3: A buffalo painted in x-ray style, Gaagudju people, western Arnhem Land, 1994 . .. 107 Figure 6 .4: John Mawurndjul Mardayin at Kudjarnngal, 2003 . 111 Figure 11 .1: A fine portrait of an Aboriginal man, probably from central Australia by Charles P . Mountford, which appeared as the frontispiece to Ion Idriess’s book Our Living Stone Age (Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1963) with the caption ‘Stone Age Man’ . 182 Figure 11 .2: A photograph appearing in Charles Barrett’s Coast of Adventure (Robertson and Mullens, 1941) showing some boys preparing a lunch-time meal and captioned in the original ‘Primitive boys prepare a primitive meal on Wessel Island’ . 183 Figure 12 .1: Narrative map of modern human dispersals . 210 vii Long History, Deep Time Figure 12 .2: Diagram from Darwin’s The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859) to illustrate the evolutionary process . 211 Figure 13 .1: Lake Mungo is one of several large and numerous smaller lake basins making up the Willandra Lakes, a relict overflow system in south-eastern Australia . .224 Figure 13 .2: The location of the study area in the central Mungo lunette . 226 Figure 13 .3: A silcrete core and refitting flakes, representing at least part of a single knapping event . 228 Figure 13 .4: A partially burned emu egg in the position in which it was cracked open after cooking . 229 Figure 13 .5: A fireplace comprising ash and lightly baked sediment, with an associated scatter of bettong bones representing a single individual (white flags) and a scatter of stone tools struck from the same nodule of silcrete (black flags) . The artefact scatter includes six sets of refits . .. 229 Figure 13 .6: A schematic cross-section summarising the stratigraphic sequence in the central Mungo lunette . 231 viii Foreword For all the methodological innovations that the discipline of academic history has seen since its birth in Europe in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, historians have on the whole, in deciding what constitutes historical evidence, clung to the idea of the primacy of the written word, of textual sources, and have been satisfied to leave the business of dating and interpreting ancient artefacts and material remains of human civilisations to prehistorians and archaeologists. While it has to be granted that these boundaries have occasionally been breached in some areas, such as in ancient Roman or Greek histories or in art history, debates in the historical profession over issues raised by the evidence of memory, personal experience, and legends and myths, have once again highlighted the ‘value’ of written sources. True, historians now acknowledge that history is only one way among many of telling the past, but the idea of the archive – a repository of written sources – is still central to how historians think of what constitutes the activity called ‘research’. We imagine prehistorians and archaeologists as people who go digging around, literally, in unfamiliar places to find their treasure-troves of evidence; when we speak of historians, we still think of a group of people prepared to suffer the consequences of prolonged exposure to the dust that usually collects over ‘old’ documents. The French once used to say, ‘no documents, no history’; the moral rule among historians still seems to be: ‘no sniffles and sneezes, no history!’ This present collection is evidence of how this presumed primacy of the written, textual evidence that historians have for generations taken for granted is now coming to be challenged. The sources of this challenge are multiple: clearly, indigenous histories, long narrated in stories and storied performances, have been troubled by this question for some decades now. Another source of this challenge has been the realisation on the part of some gifted scholars that graduate training of future historians – thanks to the relative abundance of written sources for the last hundred years or so – has often come to focus on ever shorter periods of time, and that even the tendency to go ‘global’ in world history has not been able to rectify this tendency sufficiently. History has remained, for the purpose of graduate training at least, a discipline parcelled up into regions and periods. It is out of this sense of profound dissatisfaction that arguments have arisen for ‘big’ and ‘deep’ histories, accounts of human pasts that go far, far beyond the few hundred years – or even the few millennia – that historians of globalisation or world history deal with. Some ‘big’ historians seek to incorporate human history into the history of the universe – and see this as the new ‘creation myth’ that an increasingly connected and globalised humanity needs – while other ‘deep’ historians want to go at least as far back ix Long History, Deep Time as the time when humans developed the ‘modern’, big brain that enabled them to create symbolic systems and thus cooperate in the interests of abstract and larger identities such as the group or the nation, or even ‘humanity’ itself. The current planetary environmental crisis that often goes by the name of climate change has made us only more aware that humans exist and work today, not only as differentiated members of rich and poor classes and societies, but also as a species, united by their shared dreams of development and prosperity that end up making increasing demands on what the planet and its biosphere produce. Whatever may be the sides that historians choose to pick in debates to do with climate change and the growing human consumption of energy, no one can neglect the fact that the perennial question of the place of humans in the natural order of things has emerged as one of the most urgent and insistent questions of our time, especially for scholars in the humanities.

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