Dreaming of an Indigenised Australia

ABSTRACT

This article offers a critical engagement with Billy Griffiths’s award-winning book Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia as a departure point towards uncovering and examining a significant tradition of Australian cultural reflection and interpretation it terms, following Anthony Moran, indigenising settler nationalism. Tracing the genealogy of the indigenising settler-nationalist tendencies that shape Deep Time Dreaming, and to which the text itself contributes, the article situates Griffiths’s contribution as a recent and notable exemplar of a longstanding historiographical tradition that responds to the continuing crisis of settler-national belonging and legitimacy by attempting to incorporate the historical depth of Indigenous occupation into its own national, nationalising narrative, and so to indigenise the settler nation itself. The tradition is not Griffiths’s alone. When read in the context of a broader indigenising settler-nationalist tradition, Griffiths’s approach is revealed as neither unusually problematic nor uniquely complicit in the dynamics the article draws attention to. On the contrary, the genealogical reading of Griffiths’s work I offer here is important precisely to the extent that it facilitates an understanding of the underlying tendencies towards settler indigenisation that continue to condition Australian settler-national/ist historiography, and culture at large.

KEYWORDS:

• Historiography
• settler colonialism
• nationalism
• indigenisation
• deep time

Introduction

This article started out as a relatively straightforward review of Billy Griffiths’s award-winning book Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia,¹ in which I had hoped to unpack the titular contradictions Griffiths attempts to address in his important intervention. The review quickly ballooned into a review essay incorporating other comparable histories of what used to be called Australian “pre-history”. As I worked through the comparisons and contrasts at play, I was struck repeatedly by markers of what Anthony Moran has termed indigenising settler nationalism.² In what follows, I offer a critical engagement with Griffiths’s “deep time dreaming” as a departure point towards uncovering and examining a broader, and significant, settler-nationalist tradition.

The following discussion traces the genealogy of the indigenising settler-nationalist tendencies that shape Deep Time Dreaming, and to which the text itself contributes. It situates Griffiths’s accomplished history of the development of Australian archaeology in the context of a significant tradition of Australian cultural reflection and interpretation. The tradition is not Griffiths’s alone; as he remarks, the “Australian public … are also deep time dreamers”.³ A genealogical reading of Griffiths’s work is important precisely to the extent that it facilitates an understanding of the underlying tendencies towards settler indigenisation that continue to condition Australian settler-national/ist historiography, and culture at large.

Rather than a comprehensive critical engagement with Deep Time Dreaming, the following takes it as a point of departure towards uncovering a particular, pervasive, progressive form of settler-national/ist historiography by reading Griffiths’s work in relation to a diverse but long-lasting tradition. In much the same way as Ken Gelder earlier identified Peter Read’s search for settler belonging as a “symptom” of what he termed “postcolonial” Australia, I am identifying Griffiths’s contribution as only the most recent in a significant and persistent historiographical tradition that responds to the continuing crisis of settler-national belonging by attempting to incorporate the historical depth of Indigenous occupation into its own national, nationalising narrative, and so to indigenise the settler nation as a whole.

Dreaming of an Indigenised Settler Australia

Deep Time Dreaming has been well received among academic as well as general readerships, and this reception is both warranted and revealing. The book’s cover announces Griffiths’s project as that of investigating “a twin revolution: the reassertion of Aboriginal identity in the second half of the 20th century, and the uncovering of the traces of ancient Australia”, and exploring “what it means to live in a place of great antiquity, with its complex questions of ownership and belonging”. Griffiths’s historiography of the development of archaeology in Australia since the middle of the 20th century is informative and engaging. Yet there are several unresolved tensions at the heart of Deep Time Dreaming that remain unacknowledged, or underexamined. Whereas much of the book is consciously positioned in relation to the classic question that has, as Griffiths shows, been troubling the disciplines and practitioners of archaeology and history for half a century or more of who owns the past, the more instructive question here is the related one concerning whose past it is, and what the available answers to that question suggest about the matter of national settler-colonial belonging.

Both of these questions presume a “past” conceived in linear, Western terms, and assumed to be embedded within the source materials of archaeology and historiography themselves. Despite Griffiths’s intention of “accommodating” the “two intellectual traditions” of “deep time” and Dreaming alongside each other, the assuredness with which his account opens into a narrative of “the first Australians” as “voyagers” who “explored and colonised” Australia “over 60,000 years ago” reveals the contradictions inherent to his approach.⁴ As Indigenous theologian Patricia Courtenay has remarked, from an Indigenous perspective, such a framing is “somewhat offensive and ridiculous”, and reflects “a colonial perspective” on the nature and origins of Indigenous Australia. Despite his attempted accommodation, she concludes, there remains “an unresolved tension at the heart of what this book seeks to achieve”.⁵

This tension is symptomatic of the undercurrent of settler nationalism that both impels and informs Griffiths’s account and variety of “deep time dreaming”. Beyond its engagement with questions concerning ownership of what the cover describes as “the extraordinary deep history of the Australian continent”, Deep Time Dreaming is about settler-colonial belonging, and specifically what Rob Garbutt describes as the “longing for belonging” at the heart of settler consciousness.⁶ Griffiths indicates the centrality of this concern when he situates his project in relation to the “uneasy relationship” Australians “tend to have … with the history of this continent” and remarks that, as a settler—as one of those Judith Wright characterised as “born of the conquerors”—“Australia is a country with which I feel a strong affinity, but to which I am still learning to belong”.⁷ It bears mentioning again: this problematic, and the desire for its resolution, does not belong to Griffiths alone. As Laura Rademaker has observed, the “phenomenal success” of Deep Time Dreaming “reflects an enormous public appetite for understanding Australia’s ancient past and Aboriginal people’s relationship to it”, as well as—more pertinently and problematically—a pervasive “desire to incorporate an ancient 60,000-year-old Aboriginal history into a common genealogy that might become a more suitable founding history for the nation”.⁸

As Courtenay surmised, Griffiths appears to believe that “undertaking an historical account of recent archaeology provides him the opportunity to belong to a land that his forebears conquered”.⁹ Deep Time Dreaming can thus be read as part of an established settler-nationalist tradition addressed towards what Terry Goldie termed the “impossible necessity” of settler indigenisation.¹⁰ In Goldie’s convincing account, indigenisation describes the process “through which the ‘settler’ population attempts to become as though indigenous, as though ‘born’ of the land”, and both expresses and addresses settlers’ desire to erase their “separation of belonging” from the land.¹¹ Goldie identifies two main strategies of indigenisation: “penetration”, characterised by a rejection of Indigenous presence and persistence, and “appropriation”, whereby settler culture “attempt[s] to incorporate the Other”.¹² These approaches are complementary rather than conflicting, not to be conflated but connected by a shared impulse towards settler-national/ist indigenisation.¹³

Griffiths recognises the “explicit nationalism” of figures such as W. C. (Bill) Wentworth and Gough Whitlam, and observes the former’s perception “that Aboriginal people and their cultures were a crucial icon of an independent Australian identity”.¹⁴ Yet he declares himself “sceptical of nationalistic attempts, in Harry Allen’s words, to graft ‘white culture directly onto an Aboriginal root’”.¹⁵ Griffiths shows how such attempts were largely the result of a shift in attitude towards Indigenous Australia from outright rejection towards shallow engagement and symbolic appropriation that occurred in the wake of the “crisis of national identity” provoked by Britain’s (temporary) turn towards Europe in the early 1960s, which sent Australians “casting around for national symbols”.¹⁶ Despite his stated scepticism, however, finding himself confronted by the ongoing implications of the “twin revolution” his book is concerned to examine, which has rendered “the Australian nation … a shallow stratum in a richly layered Indigenous place”, Griffiths responds in a not entirely dissimilar manner.¹⁷

Overlooking the crucial qualifier in Mark McKenna’s suggestion that “there was no history of Australia that was non-Indigenous”—that “from the moment of first contact, settler history became part of Indigenous history and Indigenous history became part of settler history”—Griffiths extends this convergence into the deep past of the Australian continent, insisting that “Australian history has been pushed back into the dizzying expanse of deep time”.¹⁸ For Griffiths, “the written sources for Australian history” dating back “only a few centuries” should no longer be regarded as “where Australian history began”.¹⁹ Rather than a “threat to the legitimacy of the society that has formed here since 1788”, in his reading, the temporal “revolution” he describes “holds promise”.²⁰ Instead of undermining the legitimacy of the settler nation, in Griffiths’s view the “uncovering” of “ancient Australia” Deep Time Dreaming accounts for works to ground it, and thereby legitimate it, casting it back into the deep past to encompass the long durée of Indigenous occupation as well as the history of settler colonisation and national formation that followed the British invasion.

This process of historiographical incorporation is carried out by a linguistic sleight of hand that works throughout the book to reframe the First Peoples of the place we now call Australia as “the first Australians”, and the continent’s deep Indigenous history as the “opening chapters” of Australian history, until by the end of the book the diverse cultures of the First Peoples of Australia have been recast as “Australia’s Classical Culture”, and “the Australian nation” goes all the way back, and all the way down. As Griffiths concludes, “the New World has become the Old”.²¹

Indigenisation via Historiographical Incorporation

In an influential article published in 1996, Denis Byrne wrote of the way in which the archaeological developments Griffiths is concerned with enabled settler-colonial Australia’s “acquisition of an Indigenous past”. Byrne convincingly framed this “acquisition” as an attempt to construct settler-colonial Australia as a “deep nation” through an “act of appropriation” that relied upon and reciprocally contributed to the reconceptualisation of the Indigenous past as part of Australia’s “national heritage”.²² Byrne identified the indigenising imperative in the settler nation’s desire “to bond itself better to the exotic terrain by sending roots down into the continent’s past” and noted the temptation archaeological findings presented to the settler nation of arrogating “to itself the time-depth represented by the archaeological remains of the indigenous [sic] minority”.²³

While Griffiths wants to impart a radical, even revolutionary, break between the developments with which he is concerned and earlier understandings of the Australian past, similarly indigenising initiatives arising within and beyond the bounds of historiography are not new for settler-colonial Australia. Byrne was certainly alert to the fact that predating the “act of appropriation” with which he was concerned, “stretching back into the nation’s colonial origins” there could be seen “a series of other ways in which the physical, ‘archaeological’ traces of the Aboriginal past had been actively colonised”.²⁴ These were the manifestations of the “antiquarian imagination” Tom Griffiths so carefully excavated in his Hunters and Collectors, which “preceded and paralleled the rise of professional archaeology and history”.²⁵

The Deep Time Deficit of Settler-Colonial Australia

For “new” nations such as Australia, the absence of history, or more precisely the apparent absence of national history, has been a consistent concern.²⁶ Theorists of nationalism have consistently emphasised the importance of what Eric Hobsbawm called “national historicity”.²⁷ In his famous 1882 lecture, What Is a Nation?, the French philosopher Ernest Renan famously described “the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories” as a key ingredient in national formation, while more than a century later Hobsbawm deemed national history the “strongest proto-national cement”.²⁸ As Stefan Berger has more recently observed: “Nation-builders everywhere agreed: their nation had to have a history—the longer and the prouder the better.”²⁹

However “abstract” or “imagined” they may actually be, deep historical ties between people and place play a crucial role in projects, and processes, of national formation.³⁰ As “Australia” began to take shape towards the close of the 19th century, as Byrne describes, it had the advantages—from a nationalist standpoint—of relative ethnic homogeneity, a “single common language”, and a rare “degree of geographic boundedness”. Its fundamental deficiency, however, was the absence of sufficient “cement” from which the foundations for the national community-to-come might be constructed, and thus “a rationale for why this particular population should be located in this particular place”. The question for settler-colonial Australia was, therefore, “how such depth could be finessed in a situation where the pre-1788 past was plainly Aboriginal”.³¹ This project has proven both urgent and difficult, since it has been consistently undermined by the existence and persistence of First Nations’ antecedent, authoritative identities, cultures and connections to the place the settler nation claims as its own.

In his examination of the indigenising settler-nationalist tradition, Anthony Moran highlights, with reference to Anthony Smith, “the importance for ethnic groups and nations of the idea of a place of mythic origin … where the ethnic group fades back into a mysterious ‘time immemorial’”. He makes a crucial observation: “To the extent that these zones exist for settler Australia, they must compete with much older, and more convincingly historical, associations of Aborigines [sic] with the land … Aboriginal Australia fits the bill of the ‘natural’ Australian ethnic group or nation far more convincingly … than does the settler nation; a problem which settler nationalists have had to deal with, in an intensified way, since the 1960s.”³² The resulting contradictions, inherent to settler-colonial projects of national construction, are evident in Griffiths’s attempt to identify in Lake Mungo “a national landscape, representing the ancient past of a young nation and the symbolic Eden of its Indigenous population”.³³

The (Settler) Problem of Indigenous Priority

Indigenous claims to priority constitute “a problem and a source of tension for settler nationalists”.³⁴ They bring to the fore what Melissa Lucashenko describes as settlers’ “illegitimate belonging”, and spark what Aileen Moreton-Robinson characterises as settlers’ “anxiety of dispossession, which rises to the surface when the nation as a white possession is perceived to be threatened”.³⁵ Yet despite the consistency of such claims from the very early days of the British/Australian settler-colonial project, their visibility and deniability are shaped by historical conditions. At certain historical junctures, such claims can be relatively easily ignored, denied or disavowed. The nationalist surge of the 1880s and 1890s, for example, was underwritten by social evolutionism and the “doomed race” ideal, which imagined an imminent future in which Indigenous peoples, and the “problem” they seemed to represent, would cease to exist.³⁶ Thus the federation debates proceeded as if Indigenous peoples had already disappeared.³⁷ Relatedly, the radical nationalist tradition of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s was underwritten by policies of biological absorption and sociocultural assimilation that envisaged a similar resolution of settler-colonial relations, albeit by different means.

The 1930s, on the other hand, in addition to being characterised by external ambivalences in Australia’s relationship with metropolitan Britain, was a period marked internally by the “decreasing tenability” of the doomed race ideal.³⁸ From a population of under 10,000 before World War I and 11,579 in 1921, the loosely defined “half-caste” population exploded from 15,468 in 1927 to almost 24,000 by the time of the 1937 conference on Aboriginal welfare, which infamously concluded that “the destiny of the natives of aboriginal [sic] origin, but not of the full blood, lies in their ultimate absorption”.³⁹ This demographic transition brought settlers face to face with settler colonialism’s “foundation event”, since the notion that the demise of the Aboriginal “race” was inevitable and that the only task remaining was to “smooth the dying pillow” was irrevocably undermined.⁴⁰

Under these circumstances, encounters with authoritative Indigeneity became if not inevitable, then at least much more likely, especially for those concerned with the project of national construction. While the absorptionist and later assimilationist response would eventually take hold, it is no coincidence that it was in this period that Australian settler nationalism became “explicitly invested in the Aboriginal figure, Aboriginal culture, and an Aboriginal past as aesthetic and cultural resources in the construction of a unique national identity”.⁴¹ These investments were hardly widespread, and their influence should not be overstated.⁴² Yet such investments did occur, and the turn towards Indigeneity within Australian settler nationalism in the 1930s is revealing of the underlying dynamics of settler colonialism in Australia, which continue to condition settler nationalism today.

The post-1967 period, with which both Griffiths and Moran are concerned, was characterised by the demise of Britishness as a “credible totem of civic and sentimental allegiance” in the wake of what Curran and Ward have described as “the unravelling of the empire and Britain’s retreat into Europe”.⁴³ This transformation raised important questions concerning Australia’s national culture and identity, to the extent that they caused what Donald Horne diagnosed as a “general ‘national identity’ crisis”.⁴⁴ But this “crisis” was also, perhaps more importantly, provoked by the strident activism and resistance through which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples attained a level of symbolic national inclusion in 1967 and demanded further rights and recognition in its wake.⁴⁵

Bernard Smith recognised this periodisation in his 1980 Boyer Lectures, when he called for “cultural convergence”: “the crucial challenge to our culture lies in the capacity to come to terms with the continuing Aboriginal presence. For the greater part of our history we have attempted to put it out of sight and out of mind but, during the past fifty years or so, it has become once again … a part of our cultural experience … More recently, during the past ten years or so, the Aborigine [sic] has also become a political presence.”⁴⁶

Indigenising Responses to the Question of Settler Belonging

Griffiths is aware of this shift—broadly speaking, from absence (imagined as either actual or imminent) to presence—and the role of Indigenous activism in its production, since this represents one pillar of his “twin revolution”. Moran highlights two possible responses to this aspect of Griffiths’s revolution, which he characterises in similar terms as entailing “the new visibility of the indigenous [sic] from the latter part of the 20th century”.⁴⁷ The first is what he terms “assimilationist settler nationalism”, a “reactive … rejection of views of the past deemed too negative, and a defensive attempt to shore up what is seen as a threatened or collapsing national unity and identity”.⁴⁸ This variety of settler nationalism expresses continuity with preceding ideological formations, insisting on national unity within the overarching framework furnished by “British civilisation”, and can be traced from traditional national/ist historiography through the denialist position in the “History Wars” debate.⁴⁹

The second option Moran identifies is what he terms “indigenising settler nationalism”, characterised by “a reaching out to embrace the indigenous [sic] (and their Aboriginality) as … members of a shared Australian nation”. The claim, in this emergent settler-nationalist tradition, is that by virtue of a shift in register from rejection to embrace, the Australian nation would be enlarged and thereby legitimated, with Indigenous peoples’ “cultural heritage, their long and deep spiritual connection with Australian lands, given as a ‘gift’ to the national community”, working to “indigenize the Australian nation as a whole”.⁵⁰ As Moran elaborates, the “desire of indigenizing settler nationalists … is to become indigenous, in the sense of truly belonging, as Aborigines [sic] do, to the Australian continent: the fulfillment, in other words, of the nationalist desire for the nation to loom out of the immemorial past … and from a ‘national territory’”.⁵¹ Indigenous peoples themselves are thoroughly instrumentalised in this equation, where they “are seen as those who can add depth and continuity to a national culture that has only sunk shallow roots into Australian soil”.⁵²

Crucially, this ostensibly more “progressive” and inclusive mode of settler nationalism can be read, as much as the assimilationist alternative, as a settler-nationalist response to the predicament already highlighted, rather than a beneficent shift arising on the part of settlers themselves. Moran is clear: both assimilationist and indigenising settler nationalisms represent reactions to Indigenous visibility. In the absence of such visibility, or in the comfort of ideologies imagining Indigenous marginality or outright disappearance, settler nationalisms are relatively free to concern themselves with more traditional pursuits: establishing the cultural/historical basis for independence from the metropole; sending down “roots” in the “new soil”; establishing national literary-cultural traditions and debating the proper content of associated canons; developing a distinctive national ethos and identity in conflict with a “hostile” environment, in the “crucible” of war; and so on.

Rather than the radical departure Griffiths’s “revolution” implies, the transition from the imagined absence to acknowledged presence of Indigenous peoples, histories and sovereignties is part of a longer trajectory with its origins in the reversal of demographic decline and emergence of organised political activism among Indigenous communities in the 1920s and into the 1930s.⁵³ While its effects were (ineffectually) repressed through the adoption of absorptionist and later assimilationist approaches, structures of feeling and associated cultural imaginaries in response, by the late 1960s they could no longer be contained. Over the post-1967 period in particular, and even more so in the wake of the High Court’s Mabo decision, the continuation of traditional modes of denial and disavowal has become increasingly untenable, and those shrinking quadrants of the cultural and historical landscape clinging to them correspondingly shrill.

One possible, if hardly plausible, response seized upon by indigenising settler nationalists was one that sought to locate the solution to the crisis produced by the first aspect of Griffiths’s revolution (“the reassertion of Aboriginal identity in the second half of the 20th century”) in the materials produced by the second (“the uncovering of the traces of ancient Australia”). This response sought to contain the challenge to settler-national identity, belonging and legitimacy re-presented by Griffiths’s revolution by doing precisely what he seems to want to do in Deep Time Dreaming: transforming a “threat” into a “promise” by incorporating Indigeneity, or in this case the Indigenous past, as an indigenising resource into a revised and extended vision of what the settler nation is, or might become. This form of indigenising settler-nationalist response to the (re)appearance and (re)assertion of Indigenous authority has proven to be a pervasive phenomenon, one to which neither archaeology nor historiography has been immune.⁵⁴

Indigenising Settler National/ist Historiography

As the Australian’s Indigenous affairs editor, Stephen Fitzpatrick, observed in his review of Deep Time Dreaming, the “question of history, and of arrivals, has long troubled us”, as evident in the “pile-on each January over the meaning of Australia Day, and over monuments and statues and place names”.⁵⁵ Griffiths’s own epilogue reflects on his project in the context of a “settler nation still struggling to come to terms with its deep Indigenous history”.⁵⁶ In a material sense too, as John Barnes pointed out, the excavation of Australia’s Indigenous past has exacerbated the problem: “As more and more of the Aboriginal past is recovered … the white relationship to the land is subtly challenged at an emotional and psychological level.”⁵⁷

This challenge was the spur for Peter Read’s exploration of settler-colonial belonging in his aptly titled Belonging, in which he responded to the questions raised by Indigenous peoples’ “pre-emptive claim of belonging” of his own right to the same.⁵⁸ As Haydie Gooder incisively has observed, despite Read’s critique of “other non-Indigenes that appropriate Aboriginal modes of belonging”, a close reading of the text reveals an “irrepressible desire to replicate indigeneity”.⁵⁹ Gelder offers a revealing reading of Read, whose work exemplifies the indigenising historiographical tradition I am concerned with here. He sees Read as “a ‘symptom’ of postcolonial” (I would say settler-colonial) Australia, “a nation-builder” in a long line of settler-national(ist) historians desirous of establishing a “deep relationship” with country organised around notions of “sharing” between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Gelder is alert to the contradictory logic underpinning Read’s project of settler indigenisation, where “Aboriginal people remain Aboriginal, but settlers become indigenous”.⁶⁰

Gelder draws instructive parallels between Tom Griffiths and what I am terming the indigenising settler-nationalist historiographical tradition.⁶¹ In Hunters and Collectors, the elder Griffiths at times seemed tempted by the logic of indigenisation evident in many of his subjects, which held that “becoming Australian would, in some senses, mean becoming ‘Aboriginal’”. Yet he maintained a critical distance throughout from the “European” (settler) project of “history-making” he is accounting for. Gelder thus demurs from classifying Tom Griffiths as belonging to the tradition he identifies, suggesting only that he “comes close” to the “fantasy of indigenising the ‘non-Aboriginal’” in his book about “the ‘prehistory’ of history that aims to give the discipline itself a ‘deep relationship’ to country” (a description that could—with some minor modification, since it is a history of “prehistory” rather than the other way round—be equally applied to Deep Time Dreaming).⁶²

In a later essay published in the Australian Humanities Review entitled “Travelling in Deep Time: La Longue Durée in Australian History”, however, Griffiths drifted much closer to an indigenising position.⁶³ Here, in a formulation that seemingly foreshadowed the younger Griffiths’s attempted accommodation, he queried whether “‘deep time’ and ‘dreamtime’ [are] as different as they might first appear” and sought their apparent convergence as extensions of “the human story into a non-human realm”.⁶⁴ In terms prefigurative of Deep Time Dreaming, Griffiths highlighted how the “discovery of an Australian human history in ‘deep time’ … has changed how we see ourselves, and how we reconfigure our country’s history”, and proposed that this “discovery … indigenises Australian history, plumbing the depths of the continent’s natural and human past, localising the Australian story”.⁶⁵

A “Shared” Australian (Settler-Colonial) History?

The operation, and popular appeal, of the indigenising settler-nationalist historiographical tradition that emerged out of and in response to the changing conditions I have outlined above reached its zenith during the official decade of reconciliation in the 1990s, and in particular in the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation’s “shared history” project, articulated as “the pursuit of a shared sense of history between indigenous [sic] and non-indigenous Australians”.⁶⁶

The council’s Key Issue Paper No. 4, entitled “Sharing History”, was addressed directly to the problem of settler belonging. Insisting that a “shared sense of history has the potential to be an influential agent of reconciliation”, the council recognised that any “immigrant peoples will, for a time, experience a degree of historical discomfort in a ‘strange’ and ‘new’ land” and proposed that “one way of coming to terms with an adopted country is to view the land through the eyes of its indigenous [sic] owners”. Beyond the avoidance expressed in the language of “immigration” (rather than settler colonisation) and “adoption” (rather than invasion), the council’s acknowledgement of the indigenising imperative, and its earlier manifestations, is noteworthy here: “In forging a new identity, the immigrant peoples in Australia have sought to share with [sic], and often appropriate, indigenous symbols, motifs, phrases, and place names—defining Australia’s distinctiveness by seeking to share Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ culture and history.”⁶⁷

As I have noted, and as the council recognised, neither the settler predicament nor the indigenising response is new, or original. Moran was certainly attentive to reconciliation’s appearance as “a new phase of a more continuous nationalist project aimed at resolving the colonial legacy of ‘shallow history’ for the nation, enabling it to tap into deep sources of connection with the continent through the full incorporation of indigenous [sic] people”.⁶⁸ In keeping with this indigenising settler-nationalist tradition, Indigenous history was seized upon and offered up by the council as an indigenising resource that works in much the same way as Griffiths’s transformation of a threat into a promise, and of the “New World” into “the Old”: to overcome settler-colonial Australia’s deep-time deficit, and settlers’ separation of belonging; to “lengthen and strengthen their association with this land”.⁶⁹

The Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation’s shared history project encouraged non-Indigenous Australians to “deepen and enrich their association with this country by identifying with the ancient Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander presence in Australia”. Contrary to the “common misconception” that “Australia is the youngest continent”, it continued, “in reality it is one of the oldest”, both geologically and in terms of “continuous human history”. Because that history was and remains Indigenous, however, it is “only through indigenous Australians [sic] that non-indigenous Australians can claim a long-standing relationship with … Australia’s land and seas, in a way possible to other nations who have occupied their native soil for thousands of years”.⁷⁰

The problem (really a predicament), and the proposed solution (really a response), could hardly be any clearer: “other nations” have deep historical ties to their “native soil”; settler-colonial Australia does not.⁷¹ By virtue of their “ancient … presence in Australia”, Indigenous “Australians” (whether they like it or not) offer non-Indigenous Australians the opportunity—their “only” opportunity—to catch up to (and even surpass) “other nations” and to “claim” (the use of the possessive is revealing, though not at all surprising) “Australia’s land and seas”—to become, in other words, indigenous.⁷² Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, cultures and histories are simultaneously instrumentalised and marginalised within the council’s exemplary settler-colonial equation: the “association” settlers are encouraged to “deepen and enrich” is with “this country”; Indigenous peoples, histories and cultures are relevant only insofar as they afford settlers the opportunity of doing so.

As Heather Goodall has pointed out, the shared history approach amounted to “a bargain” in which settlers would “acknowledge Indigenous accounts of invasion, massacres and exploitation” and, in return, would “be entitled to align themselves to the ancient history of the Australian continent … to ‘lengthen and strengthen their association to this land’”.⁷³ Much like the original settler contract, though, conceived both in and for imagined conditions of non-encounter, this “bargain” is one struck between settlers and themselves.⁷⁴ As Damien Short has remarked, much of the discourse surrounding national reconciliation in general, and shared history in particular, reflects “egocentric settler motivations”⁷⁵—namely, the desire to contain the implications of Griffiths’s “twin revolution”, to convert the apparent threat presented by Indigenous priority to the unity, coherence and legitimacy of the settler nation and associated identities into the promise of a future, secure, “reconciled” version of the same.

In keeping with settler nationalism’s ongoing efforts to “rescue settler futurity”, in an exemplary “settler move to innocence”, the “shared history” project, as Attwood has observed, was oriented towards “a shared future in which different histories and different historical identities dissolve into one another”.⁷⁶ Yet “sharing history” did not involve only the already problematic process of reconciliation via mutual dissolution to which Attwood refers, but rather the absorption, via historiographical incorporation, of the “ancient” Indigenous past into and for the purpose of lengthening and strengthening—of deepening—the Australian national story. “Sharing” was thus never really the right term for the historiographical project the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation was proposing, and others were embarking upon.

As Short has also emphasised, the process of “sharing history” was always “unidirectional”. No one was suggesting settlers share their history with Indigenous peoples, after all.⁷⁷ Nor was anyone suggesting First Nations peoples should “share” in settlers’ sense of belonging, since it was its absence that produced the “problem” to which the council’s proposal was presented as a solution in the first place. More than straightforwardly unidirectional, though, the proposed process was imagined as entailing a circular transfer that was always “managed” (to borrow from Ghassan Hage) by settlers themselves, and always in their own nationalist, nationalising interests.⁷⁸ While the “history” to be “shared” consisted primarily of Indigenous peoples’ “ancient … presence in Australia”, it was to be produced by and for settlers themselves in the service of obtaining sufficient “national historicity” to ground the settler nation. Far from envisaging the reciprocal “reconciliation of stories”, “convergence of understandings”, or production of “reconciled historical narratives” advocates of reconciliation were calling for, reconciliationist historiography was, in keeping with indigenising settler nationalism more broadly, incorporative.⁷⁹

Australian National/ist Dreaming

In a very real (though far from universal) sense, in the wake of Griffiths’s “twin revolution” and the resulting “crisis of national identity” that provoked the historiographical revolution many others have accounted for,⁸⁰ (settler) Australian historiography seems to have shifted from the period famously encapsulated by Stanner’s “great Australian silence”, characterised by the writing/whiting out of Indigenous presence from Australian history, to an emergent Australian dreaming that attempts to incorporate Indigenous history, and to a lesser extent Indigenous peoples, into the “national story”. This exists, of course, alongside a persistent but increasingly marginal denialist historiography that, in line with Moran’s assimilationist settler nationalism, attempts to maintain the disavowal that characterised the earlier tradition.

The earlier shift that both necessitated and enabled the construction of Stanner’s “silence” was one from a colonial historiography resembling Frantz Fanon’s—in which the settler “refers to the history of his mother country” and so “indicates that he himself is the extension of that mother country”—to a settler-colonial one that sought to tell the emerging nation’s story, and to thereby begin the process of laying down roots in the “new” (“virgin”) soil.⁸¹ This historiography came largely to be founded on a discourse of “newness”, which excised or at least de-emphasised the ongoing history of relations between settlers and Indigenous peoples in favour of a narrative of progressive transition involving the peaceful settlement of an empty land or at best a passing encounter (literally, an encounter in passing) between the inferior (and therefore doomed) cultures of “the Aborigines” and the superior civilisation of the nation-to-come (as in Stanner's sometimes “melancholy footnote[s]”). This latter formulation was perhaps most famously articulated in the opening passage of Manning Clark’s A History of Australia, which, in 1962, on the cusp of the repressed’s this-time irrepressible return, confidently proclaimed: “Civilization did not begin in Australia until the last quarter of the 18th century.”⁸²

The more recent shift, which discards social evolutionary progressivism in favour of supposedly “progressive” historiographical incorporativism, has to do with the reassertion of Indigenous identities Griffiths highlights, and resembles closely his approach towards the Indigenous past. Stanner’s formulation of the “silence” as a “cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale” is by now well known.⁸³ Yet his less frequently remarked upon aside is relevant here, and speaks to the changing conditions that led to its gradual, belated dismantlement: “We have been able for so long to disremember the aborigines [sic] … ”⁸⁴ By the late 1960s and early 1970s, this (convenient) ability was beginning its terminal decline. What Bernard Smith described as the “locked cupboard” of Australia’s settler-colonial past had been prised open and, as Henry Reynolds subsequently acknowledged, “History had to change”.⁸⁵ Eventually, Australian history—never universally, and not always successfully—did change, especially in its new guise as “Aboriginal history”, but also more generally in the form of what Attwood has termed “the new Australian history”, in accordance with the undertaking Stanner had called for: the incorporation of the Indigenous past “into the sweep of our story”.⁸⁶ On this point, Griffiths is clear: “Aboriginal history has moved from the periphery of the national story to its centre.”⁸⁷

By and large, these changes were actually, rather than only ostensibly, progressive, and the “truth-telling” tradition that emerged—as contentious, imperfect and incomplete as it has been—has done much to redress the historiographical errors and injustices of the past. Yet it has been by no means exclusively concerned to present the unvarnished truth about Australia’s past in a manner somehow untarnished by ideological concerns. In many ways, the opposite has been the case, and the settler self-indigenising process Ben Silverstein has identified in which Indigenous sovereignties, or in this case histories, are excavated only to be submerged has played out within and beyond the historiographical and archaeological domains as well.⁸⁸

Conclusion

Rather than recognising and responding, ethically, to the realities and implications of continuing settler-colonial relations of sovereign encounter, conflict and resistance, the indigenising settler-nationalist tradition instead attempts to reassert and reinscribe hierarchical relations of incorporation.⁸⁹ In settler-colonial Australia, where questions of sovereignty remain unaddressed and unresolved, acts of incorporation—archaeological, historiographical and otherwise—work towards two objectives simultaneously: by arrogating to the settler nation the depth of Indigenous occupation, they serve to salve settlers’ anxieties of (non)belonging, while by reframing the Indigenous past as Australia’s “deep history”, and Indigenous peoples as the first Australians, they attempt to contain the legal and political implications of Indigenous priority, difference and continuing coexistence as they pertain to rights to land, sovereignty and self-determination.

But this is not the only possibility.

As Ann McGrath and Rademaker have recently observed: “Given the colonial and nation-state’s failure to recognize Aboriginal sovereignty through treaties or an adequately recognized political voice, Indigenous people value the Western science that provides evidence of their enduring sovereignty.”⁹⁰ Indigenous peoples have found utility in settler-colonial methods of substantiating their deep and abiding connections to Country, alongside the scientific “validity” of Indigenous ways of knowing. Yet they “have also continued to assert their experiences and knowledges of different kinds of time, beyond the historicist, linear and homogenous settler-times”, pointing instead “towards to their own dynamic and enduring temporalities”.⁹¹

Rather than extending existing, settler-colonial historical (and historiographical) horizons “backwards” in time, a recognition of incommensurable Indigenous ontological and temporal sovereignties demands thinking differently about deep history, about questions of national/ist belonging, and about ongoing relations of political encounter.⁹² It may be difficult, but it is not impossible for non-Indigenous scholars, including historians, to resist the temptation towards incorporation and grapple instead with the complex questions raised by temporal and historical differences, not to mention ontological ones. The productive possibilities of such an approach are signalled by—to cite a recent, relevant example—Ann McGrath, Laura Rademaker and Jakelin Troy’s careful engagement with these questions as they relate to “the language of deep history”.⁹³

As these and other works attest, it is possible to engage with evidence of Indigenous occupation in this place without attempting to incorporate it into the “sweep of our story”.⁹⁴ It is possible to accept and learn to live with the existence and persistence of ontologies beyond the realm of “settler common sense” and temporalities beyond the scope of “settler time”, even if this is conceptually difficult if not dizzying (I write as a settler historian) to grasp.⁹⁵ This possibility requires a radical reorientation away from the foreclosure of the nature and implications of ongoing settler-colonial relations, whether by way of effacement or incorporation, and an opening up towards what Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang have termed an “ethic of incommensurability”.⁹⁶ This, in turn, requires a disinvestment from the persistent idea/l of a singular, sovereign settler nation; an abandonment of ongoing fantasies of white supremacy; a refusal to continue to treat Indigenous lands, peoples and pasts as white possessions; a learning to live with, and in, the discomfort of non-belonging.⁹⁷

Historiographically speaking, such a reorientation will necessarily involve an ongoing process of sharing unsettled, unsettling histories rather than the production of a singular, settled, settler-nationalist history, shared or otherwise.⁹⁸ After all, while settler-colonial historiographies may never be decolonising, an ethical settler-colonial historiography must at least resist the urge to be deep colonising.⁹⁹ As Barry Corr insists: “A history in which I have only a minority shareholding is not a shared history. Crimes against humanity that remain unresolved cannot be reconciled.”¹⁰⁰

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Billy Griffiths, Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia (Carlton, VIC: Black Inc., 2018).

2 See Anthony Moran, “As Australia Decolonizes: Indigenizing Settler Nationalism and the Challenges of Settler/Indigenous Relations,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 25, no. 6 (2002): 1013–42.

3 Griffiths, Deep Time Dreaming, 8.

4 Griffiths, Deep Time Dreaming, 1. Griffiths dedicates his book to “the original discoverers, explorers and colonists of Australia”. On the deeper questions raised by Griffiths’s preferences in this regard, see Laura Rademaker, “60,000 Years Is Not Forever: ‘Time Revolutions’ and Indigenous Pasts,” Postcolonial Studies 25, no. 4 (2022): 545–63.

5 Patricia Courtenay, “Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia [Book Review],” Journal of Australian Studies 42, no. 4 (2018): 539.

6 Rob Garbutt, The Locals: Identity, Place and Belonging in Australia and Beyond (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011), 194.

7 Griffiths, Deep Time Dreaming, 2–3.

8 Laura Rademaker, “A History of Deep Time: Indigenous Knowledges and Deep Pasts in Settler-Colonial Presents,” History Australia 18, no. 4 (2021): 670.

9 Courtenay, “Deep Time Dreaming,” 539.

10 Terry Goldie, Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literatures (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), 13.

11 Terry Goldie, “The Man of the Land/The Land of the Man: Patrick White and Scott Symons,” SPAN: Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies 36 (1993): 156–63; Goldie, Fear and Temptation, 13.

12 Goldie, Fear and Temptation, 15.

13 See Lorenzo Veracini, “On Settlerness,” Borderlands e-Journal 10, no. 1 (2011): 8.

14 Griffiths, Deep Time Dreaming, 52–53.

15 Griffiths, Deep Time Dreaming, 296.

16 Griffiths, Deep Time Dreaming, 204.

17 Griffiths, Deep Time Dreaming, 293.

18 McKenna, cited in Griffiths, Deep Time Dreaming, 239, emphasis added.

19 Griffiths, Deep Time Dreaming, 3, emphasis added.

20 Griffiths, Deep Time Dreaming, 293.

21 See Griffiths, Deep Time Dreaming, 149, 159, 176–77, 236, 288–89, 296, 291, 293, 2.

22 Denis Byrne, “Deep Nation: Australia’s Acquisition of an Indigenous Past,” Aboriginal History 20 (1996): 82, 100.

23 Byrne, “Deep Nation,” 82.

24 Byrne, “Deep Nation,” 82.

25 Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3.

26 On the problem (and promise) of historylessness for settler-colonial Australia, see Lorenzo Veracini, “Historylessness: Australia as a Settler Colonial Collective,” Postcolonial Studies 10, no. 3 (2007): 271–85.

27 Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

28 Ernest Renan, “What Is a Nation?,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London & New York: Routledge, 1990), 19; Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, 73.

29 Stefan Berger, ed., Writing the Nation: A Global Perspective (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1.

30 See Paul James, Nation Formation: Towards a Theory of Abstract Community (London: Sage, 1996); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised ed. (London & New York: Verso, 2006); also Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986).

31 Byrne, “Deep Nation,” 95.

32 Moran, “As Australia Decolonizes,” 1028–29.

33 Griffiths, Deep Time Dreaming, 137.

34 Moran, “As Australia Decolonizes,” 1029.

35 Melissa Lucashenko, “Country: Being and Belonging on Aboriginal Lands,” Journal of Australian Studies 29, no. 86 (2005): 9; Aileen Moreton-Robinson, “Writing Off Indigenous Sovereignty: The Discourse of Security and Patriarchal White Sovereignty,” in Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2007), 87.

36 See Russell McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880–1939 (Carlton, VIC: Melbourne University Press, 1997).

37 See Russell McGregor, Indifferent Inclusion: Aboriginal People and the Australian Nation (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2011), prologue.

38 Michael R. Griffiths, “Unsettling Artifacts: Biopolitics, Cultural Memory, and the Public Sphere in a (Post)Settler Colony” (PhD thesis, Rice University, 2012), 11.

39 McGregor, Imagined Destinies, 134–35; Aboriginal Welfare: Initial Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, April 1937), 3.

40 Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra, Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991), 26.

41 Ellen Smith, “Writing Native: The Aboriginal in Australian Cultural Nationalism 1927–1945” (PhD thesis, Princeton University, 2012), 7.

42 See Adam Shoemaker, Black Words, White Page: Aboriginal Literature 1929–1988 (Canberra: ANU Press, 2004), 41.

43 James Curran and Stuart Ward, The Unknown Nation: Australia after Empire (Carlton, VIC: Melbourne University Press, 2010), 7, 16.

44 Quoted in Curran and Ward, The Unknown Nation, 61.

45 See, for example, Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus, The 1967 Referendum: Race, Power and the Australian Constitution, 2nd ed. (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007); Gary Foley, Andrew Schaap, and Edwina Howell, eds., The Aboriginal Tent Embassy: Sovereignty, Black Power, Land Rights and the State (London: Routledge, 2014).

46 Bernard Smith, The Spectre of Truganini: 1980 Boyer Lectures (Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1980), 44.

47 Moran, “As Australia Decolonizes,” 1029.

48 Moran, “As Australia Decolonizes,” 1029.

49 See Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, The History Wars (Carlton, VIC: Melbourne University Press, 2003).

50 Moran, “As Australia Decolonizes,” 1030.

51 Anthony Moran, “The Psychodynamics of Australian Settler-Nationalism: Assimilating or Reconciling with the Aborigines?,” Political Psychology 23, no. 4 (2002): 689.

52 Moran, “As Australia Decolonizes,” 1033.

53 On the longer trajectory of the indigenising imperative, see, for example, Dan Tout, “Rex Ingamells and Ted Strehlow: Correspondences and Contradictions in Australian Settler Nationalism,” Journal of Australian Studies 44, no. 3 (2020): 254–70.

54 See, for example, John Morton, “Aboriginality, Mabo and the Republic: Indigenising Australia,” in In the Age of Mabo: History, Aborigines and Australia, ed. Bain Attwood (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1996); Freya Willis, “A Reconciled Nation? Mabo and the Reimagining of Australia’s National History,” Journal of Australian Studies 45, no. 4 (2021): 455–70.

55 Stephen Fitzpatrick, “Excavating Our Way Back to the Beginning,” Australian, 28 April 2018. See Bronwyn Carlson and Terri Farrelly, Monumental Disruptions: Aboriginal People and Colonial Commemorations in So-Called Australia (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2023).

56 Griffiths, Deep Time Dreaming, 291. Griffiths’s use of the national/ist possessive should not pass unnoticed. On its meaning and implications, see Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

57 John Barnes, “Legend,” in Australian Civilisation, ed. Richard Nile (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994), 55.

58 Peter Read, Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 9.

59 Haydie Gooder, “Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership [Book Review],” Australian Historical Studies 32, no. 117 (2001): 357.

60 Ken Gelder, “The Imaginary Eco-(Pre-)Historian: Peter Read’s Belonging as a Postcolonial ‘Symptom’,” Australian Humanities Review 19 (2000), https://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2000/09/01/the-imaginary-eco-pre-historian-peter-reads-belongingas-a-postcolonial-symptom/. Gelder’s reading of Read as what I would term an indigenising settler nationalist was subsequently elaborated in a number of essays, including, for example, Haydie Gooder and Jane M. Jacobs, “‘On the Border of the Unsayable’: The Apology in Postcolonizing Australia,” Interventions 2, no. 2 (2000): 229–47; Haydie Gooder and Jane M. Jacobs, “Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership [Book Review],” Cultural Geographies 10, no. 2 (2003): 243–46; Fiona Probyn, “How Does the Settler Belong?,” Westerly 47 (2002): 74–94; Linn Miller, “Longing for Belonging: A Critical Essay on Peter Read’s Belonging,” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 14, no. 3 (2003): 406–17; Martina Horáková, “Memoirs of (Postcolonial) Belonging: Peter Read’s ‘Belonging’ and Mark McKenna’s ‘Looking for Blackfella’s Point’,” Zeitschrift für Australienstudien/Australian Studies Journal 29 (2015): 7–26.

61 Gelder, “The Imaginary Eco-(Pre-)Historian”.

62 Gelder, “The Imaginary Eco-(Pre-)Historian”.

63 Tom Griffiths, “Travelling in Deep Time: La Longue Durée in Australian History,” Australian Humanities Review 18 (2000). Fiona Probyn corroborates my reading here, seeing Griffiths’s use of “deep time” as “echo[ing] a desire to ‘erase [settlers’] separation of belonging’” from the land—see Probyn, “How Does the Settler Belong?,” 79.

64 Griffiths, “Travelling in Deep Time”.

65 Griffiths, “Travelling in Deep Time”.

66 Ian D. Clark, Sharing History: A Sense of All Australians of a Shared Ownership of their History (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1994), 1.

67 Clark, Sharing History, 1.

68 Anthony Moran, “Aboriginal Reconciliation: Transformations in Settler Nationalism,” Melbourne Journal of Politics 25 (1998).

69 Clark, Sharing History, 1.

70 Clark, Sharing History, 1, 28.

71 On the difference between “problems” and “predicaments”, see John Michael Greer, The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age (Gabriola Islands: New Society, 2008), 22.

72 See Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive.

73 Heather Goodall, “Too Early Yet or Not Soon Enough? Reflections on Sharing Histories as Process,” Australian Historical Studies 33, no. 118 (2002): 7–24.

74 See Carole Pateman, “The Settler Contract,” in Contract and Domination, ed. Carole Pateman and Charles W. Mills (Cambridge & Malden: Polity, 2007); Veracini, “On Settlerness”.

75 Damien Short, Reconciliation and Colonial Power: Indigenous Rights in Australia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 163.

76 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization 1, no. 1 (2012): 1; Bain Attwood, “Unsettling Pasts: Reconciliation and History in Settler Australia,” Postcolonial Studies 8, no. 3 (2005): 255.

77 Short, Reconciliation and Colonial Power, 163.

78 See Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (New York: Routledge, 2000).

79 Henry Reynolds, Why Weren’t We Told? A Personal Search for the Truth about Our History (Ringwood: Penguin, 1999), 171; David Malouf, A Spirit of Play: The Making of Australian Consciousness (Sydney: ABC Books, 1998), 39–40; Read, Belonging, 186.

80 See, for example, Ann McGrath, “Contested Ground: What Is Aboriginal History?,” in Contested Ground: Australian Aborigines under the British Crown (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1995); Richard Broome, “Historians, Aborigines and Australia: Writing the National Past,” in Attwood, In the Age of Mabo; Henry Reynolds, “Historians and Indigenous Australians,” in First Peoples, Second Chance: Public Papers from the 29th Annual Symposium of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, ed. Terry Smith (Canberra: Australian Academy of the Humanities, 1999); Lorenzo Veracini, “A Prehistory of Australia’s History Wars: The Evolution of Aboriginal History during the 1970s and 1980s,” Australian Journal of Politics & History 52, no. 3 (2006): 439–54.

81 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1965), 41. Settler nationalism is, as Aileen Moreton-Robinson makes clear, a simultaneously gendered and racialised project of capitalist territorial possession—see The White Possessive.

82 Manning Clark, A History of Australia, Vol. 1: From the Earliest Times to the Age of Macquarie (Carlton, VIC: Melbourne University Press, 1962), 1; Moran, “As Australia Decolonizes,” 1016.

83 W. E. H. Stanner, “After the Dreaming,” in The Dreaming & Other Essays, ed. Robert Manne (Collingwood, VIC: Black Inc. Agenda, 2009 [1968]), 191.

84 Stanner, “After the Dreaming,” 191, emphasis added.

85 Smith, The Spectre of Truganini, 10; Henry Reynolds, Forgotten War (Sydney: NewSouth, 2013), 21. Manning Clark himself recognised the transition from imagined absence of Indigenous peoples, civilisations and sovereignties to the presence of the same, proclaiming himself in 1984 “sorry, very sorry” for not “get[ting] on earlier with the whole point about the Australian Aborigines [sic]”. See Jo Woolmington, “‘I’m Sorry, Very Sorry … ’,” in Manning Clark: Essays on His Place in History, ed. Carl Bridge (Carlton, VIC: Melbourne University Press, 1994), 104.

86 Stanner, “After the Dreaming,” 191, emphasis added. On the “new Australian history”, see Bain Attwood, “Mabo, Australia and the End of History,” in Attwood, In the Age of Mabo.

87 Griffiths, Deep Time Dreaming, 239.

88 See Ben Silverstein, “Submerged Sovereignty: Native Title within a History of Incorporation,” in Sovereignty: Frontiers of Possibility, ed. Julie Evans et al. (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013).

89 On the imperatives and implications of incorporation in a similarly settler-colonial setting, see Jacqueline Rose, The Jacqueline Rose Reader, ed. Justin Clemens and Ben Naparstek (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2011), 142.

90 Ann McGrath and Laura Rademaker, “The Languages and Temporalities of ‘Everywhen’ in Deep History,” in Everywhen: Australia and the Language of Deep History, ed. Ann McGrath, Laura Rademaker, and Jakelin Troy (Sydney: NewSouth, 2023), 18.

91 Rademaker, “60,000 Years Is Not Forever,” 555.

92 See Aileen Moreton-Robinson, “Incommensurable Sovereignties: Indigenous Ontology Matters,” in Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies, ed. Brendan Hokowhitu et al. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020).

93 McGrath, Rademaker, and Troy, Everywhen. This volume is reflective of the critical work emerging out of the Research Centre for Deep History at ANU, including those articles from Laura Rademaker cited above, in addition to Ann McGrath and Mary Anne Jebb’s earlier collection, Long History, Deep Time: Deepening Histories of Place (Canberra: ANU Press, 2015).

94 See, for example, Anna Clark, Making Australian History (Sydney: Vintage, 2022).

95 Mark Rifkin, Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2017).

96 See Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization”.

97 See Hage, White Nation; Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive; Lisa Slater, Anxieties of Belonging in Settler Colonialism: Australia, Race and Place (New York: Routledge, 2018); Lorenzo Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

98 See Goodall, “Too Early Yet or Not Soon Enough?”; Attwood, “Unsettling Pasts”.

99 See Deborah Bird Rose, “Land Rights and Deep Colonising: The Erasure of Women,” Aboriginal Law Bulletin 3, no. 85 (1996): 6–13; Lorenzo Veracini, “Isopolitics, Deep Colonizing, Settler Colonialism,” Interventions 13, no. 2 (2011): 171–89.

100 Barry Corr, “Pondering the Abyss: Tracing the Metaphors of Settler Amnesia,” Meanjin 77, no. 4 (2018): 116.