> Aboriginal people are known to have occupied mainland Australia for at least 65,000 years. It is widely accepted that this predates the modern human settlement of Europe and the Americas.
> Maybe the indigenous Australians didn't think it important to study history.
There is more than one Australian Aboriginal culture here. They all though have their particular view of ‘history’. These people don’t use abstractions as we do.
> Land, water, and sky all connect as one space, and the stories of ancestral figures and the creation of features on the land, in the water, and in the sky are all connected.
From our westernised perspectives dates are useful. It’s interesting to try and imagine such a totally different worldview where our dates are irrelevancies.
> And the question of whether (and how) Western historical narratives can populate deep history with actual lives, as well as understand and represent the thoughts, feeling and senses of people who lived thousands of years ago, is still to be answered.
>This uncertainty is not unique to Australia, as a recent statement on decolonising research by the American Historical Review makes clear. The ethical demand to engage with, acknowledge and include Indigenous forms of history has extended the discipline into new, albeit sometimes challenging, epistemological territory around the world.
B0ssc0 OP t1_jdbw2ci wrote
Reply to comment by shruggedbeware in ‘Dates add nothing to our culture’: Everywhen explores Indigenous deep history, challenging linear, colonial narratives by B0ssc0
> Aboriginal people are known to have occupied mainland Australia for at least 65,000 years. It is widely accepted that this predates the modern human settlement of Europe and the Americas.
https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/evidence-of-first-peoples
http://www.workingwithindigenousaustralians.info/content/History_2_60,000_years.html
https://library.norwood.vic.edu.au/c.php?g=947355&p=6863582
Etc etc