Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia - Softcover

Griffiths, Billy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1760640441 ISBN 13: 9781760640446

Publisher: Black Inc., 2018

Synopsis

‘People would have known about Australia before they saw it. Smoke billowing above the sea spoke of a land that lay beyond the horizon. A dense cloud of migrating birds may have pointed the way. But the first Australians were voyaging into the unknown.’

Soon after Billy Griffiths joins his first archaeological dig as camp manager and cook, he is hooked. Equipped with a historian’s inquiring mind, he embarks on a journey through time, seeking to understand the extraordinary deep history of the Australian continent.

Deep Time Dreaming is the passionate product of that journey. It investigates a twin revolution: the reassertion of Aboriginal identity in the second half of the twentieth century, and the uncovering of the traces of ancient Australia. It explores what it means to live in a place of great antiquity, with its complex questions of ownership

About this title

Review

'What a revelatory work! If you wish to hear the voice of our continent's history before the written word, Deep Time Dreaming is a must read. The freshest, most important book about our past in years.'  – Tim Flannery

‘Billy Griffiths’ Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia is a remarkable book, and one destined, I believe, to become a modern classic of Australian history writing. Written in vivid, evocative prose, this book will grip both the expert and the general reader alike. It tells a story of physical, political and cultural challenge and discovery, where fascinating individuals encounter and decipher awe-inspiring ancient places. Sensitive and scrupulous, the book does full justice to the achievements and concerns of the Indigenous peoples who shaped and inscribed this ancient land, portraying them as living agents rather than static objects of archaeological study. Respectful of the complexities and technical difficulties of archaeological practice, Billy nevertheless manages to convey its soaring excitements and epiphanies. Both ancient and modern Australia have here found a truly worthy historian.’ – Iain McCalman

'Deftly weaving together biography, history and literature, an immense variety of Australian landscapes and ecologies with the many and complex strands of archaeology, Griffiths brilliantly charts the history of modern Aboriginal archaeology in Australia. Deep Time Dreaming is beautifully written, utterly fluid, with the clarity and feeling of a writer who has mastered both his material and the analytical power of narrative. Rich and absorbing, at times spell-binding.' – Grace Karskens

About the Author

Billy Griffiths is the author of The China Breakthrough and co-editor with Mike Smith of The Australian Archaeologist's Book of Quotations. He is a research fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation.

Edition details

• Publisher: Black Inc.
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1760640441
• ISBN 13: 9781760640446
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 392