For Christmas, I got copies of a book for my sister in Australia, my parents in California, and us in New York. Billy Griffiths' Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia, not published in the US yet (or perhaps ever), is a book I learned about because my enterprising nephew was doing tech for the first Mountain Writers Festival last month, and Griffiths was one of the speakers. Deep Time Dreaming is a sort of history of Australian archaeology. On the book jacket it promises to investigate 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... When [John] Mulvaney began his fieldwork on Australian soil in January 1956 ... it was widely believed that the first Australians had arrived on this continent only a few thousand years earlier. They were regarded as 'primitive' - a fossilized stage in human evolution - but not necessarily as ancient. ... 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, which was colonized by Homo sapens some 40,000 years ago, and the Australian landscape, far from being terra nullius, is now recognized 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. (2)
I was inititally discomfited by the settler framing: "widely believed" by whom? "regarded" by whom? and just who "pushed back" "Australian history," whataver that is? But Griffiths uses these terms knowingly. The story he tells is that of settler Australians (whom he just calls "Australians") learning that they are on sacred land, maintained by an ancient civilization, slowly developing a "deep time" consciousness anchored in new relationship with the ancestral custodians of the land.
A few chapters in, Griffiths describes a conversation with Daryl Pappin, a Mutthi Mutthi man who's showing him the area near where some major discoveries were made in the late 1960s.
I talk about how the discoveries at Mungo pushed the human history of Australia to the limits of radiocarbon dating and presented, for a time, the oldest evidence for modern humans outside of Africa. 'It's amazing how the dating of Aboriginal occupation in Australia went from a few thousand years in the 1950s to 25,000 years in the 1960s, then 40,000 years, and now maybe even 60,000 years.'
'And it's a lot more than that,' Daryl smiles at me. 'It goes up and up and up until forever.'
'Isn't 60,000 years pretty much forever?'' I reply. 'I find it hard to even fathom that number.'
Daryl drives silently, as if to say, 'Well, no, 60,000 years isn't forever.' (112)
I'm about a third of the way in, and can feel voices like Pappin's - entirely absent as the story begins - becoming more and more central. The book looks to be an education in fathoming, or recognizing one's settler mind can't fathom, the deep time history of the land one inhabits, allowing, perhaps, a truer, deeper kind of inhabitation deferring to those who know it best. I sense it might offer lessons for living respectfully for this family of settlers; 'America' is another New World which turns out to be unfathomably older.
