Uncovering Ancient Australia

At the end of January, I completed a read of a rather fascinating book [to my mind anyway ] entitled ‘Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia” written by Billy Griffiths, published in 2018, 376 pages.   A rather special book, presenting a really interesting insight into the deep history of this nation’s Indigenous people, yet also combined with some rather disturbing elements, following the arrival of Europeans in Australia.

From the book cover –  soon after Billy Griffiths joins his first archaeological dig as camp manager and cook, he is hooked. Equipped with a historian’s inquiring mind, he embarks on a journey through time, seeking to understand the extraordinary deep history of the Australian continent.  Deep Time Dreaming is the passionate product of that journey. It investigates a twin revolution: the reassertion of Aboriginal identity in the second half of the twentieth century, and the uncovering of the traces of ancient Australia. It explores what it means to live in a place of great antiquity, with its complex questions of ownership and belonging. It is about a slow shift in national consciousness: the deep time dreaming that has changed the way many of us relate to this continent and its enduring, dynamic human history.

When John Mulvaney began his fieldwork in January 1956, it was widely believed that the first Australians had arrived on this continent only a few thousand years earlier. In the decades since, Australian history has been pushed back into the dizzying expanse of deep time. The human presence here has been revealed to be more ancient than that of Europe, and the Australian landscape, far from being terra nullius, is now recognised to be cultural as much as natural, imprinted with stories and law and shaped by the hands and firesticks of thousands of generations of Indigenous men and women. The New World has become the Old

There were a couple of subject areas in the book to which I attached a touch of personal connection.

The section on Lake Mungo in south western NSW and the discovery of Mungo Man and Mungo Woman resonated with the writer, at I had visited that area ‘as part of a tour’  from Mildura, in July, 1980, and was at the time, quite intrigued by the stories of those relatively recent finds. Lake Mungo is a dry lake located in south-eastern Australia, in the south-western portion of New South Wales. It is about 760 km due west of Sydney and 90 km north-east of Mildura. The lake is the central feature of Mungo National Park, and is one of seventeen lakes in the World Heritage listed Willandra Lakes Region. The Lake Mungo remains were three prominent sets of Aboriginal Australian human remains: Lake Mungo 1 (also called Mungo Woman, LM1, and ANU-618), Lake Mungo 3 (also called Mungo Man, Lake Mungo III, and LM3), and Lake Mungo 2 (LM2).   Mungo woman (LM1) was discovered in 1969 and is one of the world’s oldest known cremations. The remains designated Mungo man (LM3) were discovered in 1974, and are dated to around 42,000 years old, the Pleistocene epoch, and are the oldest Homo sapiens (human) remains found on the Australian continent.

The Mungo National Park itself, can be visited by tourists and is accessed by an unsealed road. Boardwalks have been installed throughout the sand dunes and visitors are forbidden from stepping off the boardwalks unless accompanied by an Aboriginal guide [I don’t recall that set-up in existence when I was there in 1980]. In 2014, fake bones were buried throughout the area as part of an experiment for La Trobe University. Within two weeks, nearly all of the artificial bones had disappeared.  Always has been a problem with archaeological sites – trophy hunters, tomb raiders, and so-called ‘cowboy’ archaeologists.

From Griffith’s book we read:  “The fortuitous nature of her preservation [Mungo 1] and the influence of her discovery on the Australian public, has led traditional owners such as Dorothy Lawson to declare that, ‘She surfaced for a reason,’. As Mutthi Mutthi elder…Mary Paqppin wrote, ‘I believe that the Mungo Lady came to walk with our people to help us with our struggle and to tell the rest of the world about our cultural identity with that land’.The resurrection of Mungo Lady changed the face of Australian archaeology. As Bowler reflected in 2015, ‘I stumbled across these bones and blundered into an archaeological and cultural minefield’.”  [pps. 123-124].

Bowler was not an archaeologist, and found his discoveries by accident, as described in the following paragraph, the source of which I have mislaid!………………..In the 1960s a young geologist began to take an interest in the Willandra area. Jim Bowler was looking for somewhere he could extend his studies into what happened to Australia’s landscape and climate in the Pleistocene epoch (between 1.8 million and 10,000 years ago). From aerial photographs he recognised a large complex of fossil lakes in the now semi-arid plains of south-western New South Wales. Bowler was particularly drawn to Lake Mungo because erosion of the lunette offered a chance to look into ancient layers of sediment.

In 1967 Bowler investigated layers of windblown sand and clay piled up in the lunette. He found freshwater mussel shells and what looked like stone tools deep down in ancient deposits. Returning in 1968 he saw what looked like burnt bones and decided to bring in some archaeologists. A year later John Mulvaney and Rhys Jones probed the bones and turned over an unmistakable human jaw.

Bowler described how they were confronted with “the very presence of humanity itself”. Caught by surprise, the archaeologists collected the bones in a leather suitcase that Mulvaney had with him and took both back to the Australian National University. The remains were labelled Lake Mungo I and later determined to be of an adult female. She became known as Mungo Woman, or Mungo Lady.

One of the many academic research characters mentioned in the book is Professor Geoffrey Blainey. Born in 1930, he is one of Australia’s most successful historians and a prolific writer of books about all aspects of Australian and World history. He was once described by Professor Graeme Davison as the “most prolific, wide-ranging, inventive, and, in the 1980s and 1990s, most controversial of Australia’s living historians”.

I was privileged in the early 1970s to have been a student in Professor Blainey’s Economic History course at the University of Melbourne, and one part of that year’s syllabus was an excursion to an archaeological site. I can’t recall the site details except that it was down towards Ballarat, here in Victoria, perhaps on the road between Ballan and Daylesford from memory,  on a private property in that area.. I’ve remained a strong admirer of Blainey’s writings and views on Aboriginal and Australian history in general, though his views were occasionally controversial, as indicated previously.  One of his most famous books was ‘Triumph of the Nomads [1966] – the book’s most enduring insight was his rendering of the rising seas at the end of the last ice age. He wrote: “Nothing in the short history of white men in Australia…can be compared with the ancient rising of the seas, the shaping of thousands of new harbours, the swamping of scores of tribal territories and the wiping out of the evidence of the aboriginal life once lived on those drowned lands”.[Triumph of the Nomads, p.10-14].

In the second half of this article, I’ve selected three separate reviews, aimed at giving different aspects of the way the book can be looked at, and also to provide what is obviously a selection of more professional appraisals of Griffith’s work and what it means, then I could ever do justice to myself, and of course, to provide readers with a synopsis of the book itself..

From the Sydney Morning Herald Reviewer, Rebe Taylor [8/3/2018]

A young Indigenous man recently tweeted: “been sitting at my desk all day, but I don’t know that until an archaeologist tells me.” I had to laugh. It was a clever swipe at the “whitesplaining” Indigenous people must have to endure from academics. But then I found myself thinking: the discovery of deep time within scientific ways of knowing has changed how Australians relate to the Indigenous past. Especially as it was made when Indigenous people were reasserting their rights to land and culture. So, it has been with real interest and satisfaction that I found that these ideas are the heart of a new and wonderful book by Billy Griffiths: Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia.

Griffiths is a young historian who yearned to get beyond the few centuries of written Australian historical records and to understand how it is that archaeologists explore the deeper past. His research took him to archaeological sites in every Australian state and territory – sometimes as camp manager and cook. Digging holes and lab-based dating methods were, Griffiths learned, only part of the process. Archaeologists also formed complex and intimate relationships with the places they researched, including with their traditional owners.

His approach has been integral to the 60 years of collective research that has uncovered 65,000 years of Australian Indigenous continuity and change. So it is that personalities, politics and culture have shaped how archaeologists have read Australia’s ancient past. And as Griffiths ably shows us, the reverse is also true: the revelation of deep time has indeed meant a profound shift in how Australians relate to their country. Archaeology, as Griffiths put it, has made deep time dreamers of us all.

Each of Griffiths’ chapters follows an individual archaeologist’s relationship with a region or site across Australia. From Tasmania to the Top End, we are swept up in their passionate endeavours, achievements and occasional failures.

The journey begins in 1956 with John Mulvaney, then Australia’s only trained archaeologist, struggling to form a team and even to fund a vehicle to get them into the field. I gasped in disbelief when Mulvaney calls the ABC to report that his northern Queensland dig had had a date of more than 14,000 years, only to be told it was of “no interest” to the public! As Griffiths shows us, nothing could be further from the truth. Uncovering Australia’s deep past has influenced national politics, policies and identities.

Jim Bowler’s almost-accidental 1969 discovery in the Willandra Lakes district of the 40,000 year-old remains of Mungo Lady was a watershed for international science, the Australian public and Indigenous people. “You have been here 200 years, we for 40,000,” read placards protesting the Australian Day celebrations in 1988. The successful campaign to save Tasmania’s Franklin River, which swung the 1983 Federal election in Bob Hawke’s favour, depended upon the work of archaeologists dating local sites back to the last Ice Age.

And in 2017, the team at the Madjedbebe rock shelter near Kakadu confirmed that the first Australians arrived 65,000 years ago. The implications of this freshest finding cannot be underestimated, Griffiths explains, for it means reconsidering the global story of human migration.

But Griffiths warns us not to be “dazzled” by Australian archaeology’s big numbers. More important is that Australians gain an inclusive and humanist approach to understanding their country’s past. This is perhaps the most important message in this beautifully written book.

Griffiths quotes Indigenous activist Charlie Perkins: “My expectation of a good Australia is when White people would be proud … when they realise that Aboriginal culture … is all there waiting for us all. White people can inherit … 60,000 years of culture, and all have they to do is reach out and ask for it.”

What is so powerful about Perkins’ offer is not only its generosity, Griffiths explains, but the obligations it carries. The offer to share culture means committing to care for what has been retained as well acknowledging all that has been lost in the past 200 years since colonisation. If the deep past has bequeathed a living, complex Indigenous culture, it requires a collective recognition and respect for ensure its endurance into the future.

Meantime, from the Australian Book Review –[Kim Mahood] [part of]

In Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering ancient Australia, Billy Griffiths describes the process of imagining the past through the traces and sediments of archaeology as ‘an act of wonder – a dilation of the commonplace – that challenges us to infer meaning from the cryptic residue of former worlds’.

In his endeavour to infer meaning from this cryptic residue, Griffiths begins his wondering by sifting through the evidence, insights, enthusiasms, and mistakes of an articulate band of Cambridge-trained archaeologists who, from the 1960s, professionalised what had been the province of amateurs. Led by John Mulvaney, they halted the indiscriminate gathering of artefacts and human remains, brought rigorous techniques to the excavation of sites, and began to strip back the layers of time, aeon by aeon, to reveal the astonishing antiquity of human presence on the Australian continent.

By writing a history of the evolving discipline of Australian archaeology, Griffiths invites us to imagine a history of ancient Australia. The structure he has chosen serves his project well – to tell the stories of the significant players; the famous, the infamous, and the invisible; their personalities, methodologies, and discoveries – and, in so doing, to create a narrative that is accessible and compelling. It is a tale of the characters who dug the trenches, of the Indigenous people who objected to the cavalier approach of the early ‘cowboy’ archaeologists, of the political reverberations of archaeological finds within environmentally contested regions, of conflict and discovery and the shifting relations between white and Indigenous Australia.

And finally, this comment, taken from a review of two books on the subject, by Tom Clark [from Sydney’s Review of Books], 5/11/2018.

Viewed another way, Australia – both the Commonwealth of Australia and the living community of Australia – is constituted on fundamental mistruths about the history of this continent’s human inhabitation.

Truths easy enough to find out remain unpublished. Truths widely known before 1850 were removed from public knowledge over the next 100 years. Truths about the history of colonial expropriation and violence are spuriously contested, when even the perpetrators were once explicit about them.

We do no injustice to the Uluru view if we note that it offers a strong measure of idealism about this truth. ‘No one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other,’ as Hannah Arendt began one of her most quotable sentences.

When the erstwhile [former] Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull quashed the policy agenda arising from Uluru, he stamped his agreement to its other half: ‘and no one, as far as I know, has ever counted truthfulness among the political virtues.’