Acph History Byte - Why is it important to study aboriginal history along other australian histories?

Well, I think this is where Aboriginal history is an incredibly exciting area. Aboriginal people have very successfully contested this idea that history is only... in the setting of Australia... is a couple of hundred years old and that it's confined to the archives, that is particular written documents. And certainly that is an important part of Aboriginal history... But what about the 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 particular spatial connections that is, that 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 to history is to poke it with a lot of sticks and to force it actually to be much more innovative and creative. And that's picked up in a few exciting ways: for example, storytelling and working across disciplines. For example: indigenous knowledge holders and scientists working to tell stories about places where the water sources are contaminated, for instance. Tell stories of seasons, that far exceed the European four seasons (somewhere between 9–11 seasons) of understanding the interconnections of weather patterns, and provide accounts of the past that are over much longer periods of time then say the last couple of hundred years. And that new emerging body of work that is 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, approaches to knowing and doing history. And that's really Aboriginal worlds are essential to that. And one other thing I’d add is that Aboriginal societies and communities have also recovered a lot of land (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 confronts 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 benefit from.