Deep Time Dreaming, Billy Griffiths

Archaeologists work with toothbrushes and sieves. They sit on folding stools in the bottom of very neat holes they have dug, shoulders hunched and peering at a fragment of something or other between their fingertips. They wear khaki and no-one cares what they think. Ancient Australia has no material record—and therefore no archaeology—because Aboriginal people moved lightweight over the land and didn’t build anything. And even if they did leave traces, and they were found, the material would be of no more than academic interest to a handful of obsessives.

There. Have I covered the canards? Because Billy Griffiths has written a book that tears them up and grinds the shreds under a dusty work boot. Here is archaeology as passion; fierce and relevant. Here are dizzying meditations on time and human purpose. Here are the complex relationships between the hidden traces in the ground and the politics of the day. What does it mean to unearth a human skeleton: a hundred years old, or a thousand, or forty thousand? Where are the lines between scientific study and graverobbing? Who asked those scientists to ‘prove’ the things that Aboriginal people have believed and cherished and argued for all along? And without doing so, how else to establish the enormous gravity inherent in Australian identity? Are we thongs and Cronulla, the Harbour Bridge and an infantile chief executive in a surf cap? Or are we perched atop an unthinkably gigantic mass of accumulated time, mere isotopic specks in the geological strata? Can we be both of these things?