Publications

As part of the latest conversation in the First Nations Speaker Series Wayne Brennan spoke about a community based Aboriginal rock art project in the Blue Mountains.

Wayne is an archaeologist of Gamilaraay descent, who specialises in Aboriginal rock art. He has lived and conducted research in the Blue Mountains for over 35 years. Wayne has worked as an education officer, researcher and remote fire fighter for the National Parks and Wildlife Service and is currently an Aboriginal heritage consultant and visiting research fellow with the Australian Museum, Sydney.

Catch up on this conversation here: https://youtu.be/ixGyJyXAso8

The First Nations Speaker Series is presented in collaboration with Sydney Living Museums, GML Heritage and the Research Centre for Deep History.

As the Centre’s mapping project Marking Country moves into its final phase, the Centre’s Deputy Director Mike Jones shares an update.

When I first joined the Laureate program in 2019, our plan as a team was to create a digital atlas that used a national map to display lots of data and many layers of information. But though the shape of the continent continues to provide a frame of reference, it soon became clear we shouldn’t be trying to unify local stories from different communities or attempting to fill the map with as many sites as possible. Guided by our Indigenous Advisory Committee and our collaborating researchers, we realised that what we needed to do instead was create a space for deeper engagement with local landscapes, histories, and perspectives.

There will still be plenty of maps included in Marking Country. But the focus isn’t on location markers or individual sites, it’s about the way people engage with Country, and have done for many generations—since the Creation, as many communities see it—developing and maintaining a sense of place, creating rock art, shaping the landscape, moving from place to place, telling stories, singing songs, and learning family histories. Deep history is about these layers that in a broad sense mark Country, leaving a trace.

Whether the result is still an ‘atlas’ is an open question. Terms can be loaded with historical baggage, and we need to be careful about what we bring to this space. We need to ask the people we work with about the set of meanings that word has for them and if they are negative, we need to consider alternatives.

At this stage of the project there are a lot of moving parts, with a number of stories all at different stages. Although the project has been hampered by COVID lock-downs and border closures, we have several stories we are co-creating with Indigenous custodians around the country: Director Ann McGrath and I were privileged to visit Quinkan Country on the Cape York Peninsula in Queensland with local guide Johnny Murison; Ann and Amy Way had a recent trip to Koolmandanji Place (also known as Carnarvon Gorge) in Queensland led by Jackie Huggins and Uncle Fred (Cotto) Conway; Ben Silverstein and I are collaborating with Nyamba Buru Yawuru in and around Broome; Laura Rademaker (former Deputy Director, now collaborating scholar) is working with the Groote Eylandt community; Ann and cultural mapping expert Kim Mahood have worked with families in the Willandra Lakes district in south-western NSW; collaborating scholar Mary Anne Jebb is developing material with Woddordda and Ngarinyin people in the Kimberley; and Ann is working with Emma Batchelor on a more general story about historical maps.

Over the next month or two we will be confirming the stories that will be included for the Marking Country launch, drafting content, identifying the images and videos we will use, and getting a better sense of the themes that are emerging. It’s also vital that during this time we keep taking material back to community participants and collaborators for feedback. Once we have further developed the content, we will also spend time reviewing our work with the project’s Senior Advisor, Professor Jackie Huggins.

From this point on it is a very iterative process, and the iterations will get shorter right up until launch as we finalise content and test the site. Our developer Tabs Fakier is key to this process. The content we gather and the messages we want to convey inform her design process and the technologies used. As it’s not possible to custom build every story, these designs then become templates that help shape other stories. With the launch booked for November, and content from fieldwork still coming in, the timeframes are tight, but we are looking forward to sharing the results with communities, researchers, and the public.

The past three years have been a fantastic experience, and we have all learned a great deal about working with communities interested in sharing deep time stories and rich cultural knowledge, as well as the challenges of developing significant digital public history resources. When Marking Country goes live in November, we hope it will become a valuable resource for anyone who wants to engage with some of the many long and diverse histories found right across these lands.

To understand more about the technical and web development aspect of this project catch up on this blog from Tabs Fakier: https://resdeephistprd.wpenginepowered.com/live-streaming-building-the-re-atlas

Amid a climate of crisis and ‘unprecedented times’, moments of destruction and devastation are intertwined with those of respite and renewal. By exploring these moments—their mechanisms and tensions—scholars can produce new insights into our past, present and potential futures.

In Part II of this deep conversation, join Dr Annick Thomassin, Dr Nicholas Hoare, and Dr Scott McKinnon as they reflect on the practice, meaning and significance of rehabilitation, and its significance for communities, histories, institutions, and ecologies.

Date: Monday 23 May 2022

The Research Centre for Deep History was pleased to welcome Postdoctoral Research Associate Dr. Amy Way in February this year. Amy specialises in the history of human antiquity and deep time in Australia, and its conceptualisation within geology, archaeology, anthropology and public discourse. She received the Vice Chancellor’s Commendation for Academic Excellence for her PhD dissertation (2020), and in 2021, was awarded the Australian Historical Association’s Ann Curthoys Prize for her study of Aboriginal antiquity in Australian anthropology.

RCDH: What drew you to the Centre for Deep History?

Amy: I have always been fascinated by Australian history, and especially the narratives settler-Australians choose to tell themselves about the past. The Centre for Deep History shares my concern with deepening historical narratives, questioning traditional periodisation, transforming the scale of history, and bridging the gap between the deep past and the present. But what really drew me to the Centre is not just how the team use their research to reshape how we think about history, but how their work platforms, and is led by, Indigenous voices. Deep history in Australia goes beyond settler epistemology to be first and foremost an embodied, living history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander’s enduring connection to Country.

RCDH: What will you be working on?

A: I’ll be working on turning my doctoral research into a book, while also helping the team finish the Centre’s digital deep history atlas. I’ll be conducting fieldwork on Country, collecting oral histories, and searching through collections for artefacts that help communicate deep history beyond the colonial archive. I am also running training workshops, and co-convening the Deep Conversations: History, Science, Environment seminar series with colleagues in the Centre for Environmental History.

RCDH: What were you doing before you came to Re?

A: Before I moved to Canberra, I lived in Sydney and taught Australian history at Macquarie University and the University of Notre Dame (Ultimo). I also worked as an Education Officer for Macquarie University’s fantastic history incursions program, Studying the Past, which delivered ancient and modern history workshops to high school students. Outside of teaching, I was (and still am) working on a biography of paleontologist and museum director Robert Etheridge Junior (1846-1920), in partnership with the Australian Museum and Etheridge descendants.

Amy’s work has been published in History Australia and Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science. She is a Visiting Fellow with the New Earth Histories Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, Sydney.

Follow Amy on twitter: @amywayness