For history teachers

Transcript

Well, I think this is where Aboriginal history is an incredibly exciting area.

Aboriginal people have very successfully contested this idea of history that, in the Australian setting, is only a couple of hundred years old, and that it's confined to the archives, to particular written documents.

And certainly that's an important part of Aboriginal history, but what about a history that extends for some 60,000 years, that is over much greater time periods, where the archive is extended to include rock art and oral histories, storytelling that changes over time and has a particular spatial connection—that is to say, it's related to place.

In that sense, Aboriginal history has posed real challenges to the discipline of history.

And when we say the discipline of history, we might think about: how do you go about writing history?

And what Aboriginal worlds have done, in a sense, to history is kind of poke it with a lot of sticks and force it to actually be much more innovative and creative.

And that's picked up in some exciting ways—in thinking about storytelling, in thinking about working across disciplines.

So, for example, Indigenous knowledge holders and scientists working to tell stories of places where, actually, the water source is contaminated, for instance, or tell stories of seasons that far exceed the kind of European four seasons—we might be thinking somewhere between nine and eleven seasons—of understanding the interconnections of weather patterns and providing accounts of the past that are over much longer periods of time than, say, the last couple of hundred years.

And that emerging body of work, characterised by collaborations and knowledge sharing, is referred to as deep history.

So, in this sense, those older categories of modern history and ancient history—they collapse.

And I think in Australia, a place like Australia, this incredibly ancient land, we see the most exciting developments in historiography, or approaches to knowing and doing history.

And Aboriginal worlds are really central to that.

And one other thing I'd add is that Aboriginal societies and communities have also recovered a lot of land—and that's not even across Australia, but those land holdings are quite often of high conservation value.

And as Australia, particularly, and the globe more broadly, confront issues around climate change, this really places storytelling and knowledge of Country as central to our understanding of place and creating a future that we can all, you know, benefit from.