There didn’t seem much point in digging anything up. This was of no interest apart from mild curiosity. In the deserts, customs had still been practised in our lifetime and were recorded on film. In any case, they were soon going to disappear as a race, absorbed into the general Australian population in the deliberate policy of assimilation. Apart from some large middens that told us they liked their seafood (what’s changed there?), some intriguing fish traps at Brewarrina and lots of impressive rock art, the natives hadn’t left a large footprint.

As nomadic hunter/gatherers, most of their artifacts were made of biodegradable materials – not that we knew that terminology then – and had naturally returned to nature. When the British colonised the continent, Aboriginals were thought of as Stone Age people and, apparently, had not changed in the 200 years since. As he writes: “Beneath a thin veneer, the evidence of ancient Australia is everywhere, a pulsing presence.” Back then, to the general public, Australia’s history didn’t seem worth searching for in the same ways as that of Britain or the Middle East.īut recently Billy Griffith’s ‘vivid, evocative prose’ has absolutely changed my perspective on Australia’s history and pre-history.

I flew into Sydney as a ten pound Pom in 1963. Sometimes the conclusions the Time Team came to seemed a little far-fetched, but I was still fascinated by the amount of history that could be deduced from artifacts recovered from a carefully excavated site. My archaeological education was almost entirely through the British TV Channel 4’s Time Team with commentator Tony Robinson. Rachel Matthews reviews Billy Griffiths’s 2018 book Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia

Deep Time Dreaming by Billy Griffiths