Deep History

At numerous points across the 12 fascinating essays that make up Deep History, the collection’s many contributors offer definitions of ‘deep time’ and ‘deep history’ that foreground the concepts’ importance to building a just and informed national identity. The idea at play is both richly nuanced and effortlessly simple: the history of Australia did not start in 1788. Indeed, ‘deep history’ extends far, far beyond the inception of colonial Australia, and into the tens of thousands of years of Indigenous occupation and ownership of Country that preceded it. It is a history made no less legitimate by the absence of written records – the benchmark of Western historical practice – and instead one that invites new forms of evidence: oral traditions, material culture and the land itself. By acknowledging this history, the collection argues, we might deepen our understanding of Australia’s past not only quantitatively but also qualitatively, upending the conceptions of time and history that subconsciously shape our thinking.

Deep History is a work of high-level academic reflection and vibrant digression, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. As an anthology, each essay wields a degree of independence with which the authors explore topics ranging from literary analysis of Tara June Winch’s fiction to an archaeological account of the preserved tracks at Lake Mungo. Such breadth of focus also manifests geographically, with chapters on traditional Māori food cultivation or the power of oral memory in Papua New Guinea, presenting both variation and congruence with our familiar Australian contexts. Nevertheless, within this variety, each essay maintains a steadfast commitment to the defining principle of Deep History: that to draw some line between colonial history and Indigenous prehistory is to erase the continuity and persistence of First Nations’ cultures and consign them to the past. Such erasure silences voices. Deep History, as this collection argues, empowers them.