Deep Time Dreaming

With a historian's inquiring mind, Billy Griffiths excavates two absorbing twentieth-century histories: the reassertion of Aboriginal identity and the uncovering of traces of ancient Australia by pioneering archaeologists.

Deep Time Dreaming is the passionate product of that journey. In this original, important book, Griffiths investigates a twin revolution: the reassertion of Aboriginal identity in the second half of the twentieth century, and the simultaneous uncovering of the traces of ancient Australia by pioneering archaeologists.

Deep Time Dreaming is about a slow shift in national consciousness. It explores what it means to live in a place of great antiquity, with its complex questions of ownership and identity. It brings to life the deep time dreaming that has changed the way many Australians relate to their continent and its enduring, dynamic human history.

'When John Mulvaney began his fieldwork in January 1956, it was widely believed that the first Australians had arrived on this continent only a few thousand years earlier. In the decades since, Australian history has been pushed back into the dizzying expanse of deep time. The human presence here has been revealed to be more ancient than that of Europe, and the Australian landscape, far from being terra nullius, is now recognised to be cultural as much as natural, imprinted with stories and law and shaped by the hands and firesticks of thousands of generations of Indigenous men and women. The New World has become the Old ...'

Winner of the Felicia A. Holton Book Award, the Max Crawford Medal, the Ernest Scott Prize, the Book of the Year at the NSW Premier's Literary Awards, the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction and the John Mulvaney Book Award. Highly Commended in the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. Shortlisted in the Queensland Literary Awards, the Prime Minister's Literary Awards, and the Educational Publishing Awards. Longlisted in the Australian Book Industry Awards and for the CHASS Book Prize.

'This book is hugely impressive, a revelation, showing that archaeology has been far more important to Australian culture than anyone could have guessed. Every Australian should read it.' -Tim Low

'Beautifully written, with a cast of compelling characters both ancient and modern, and a storyline that traces one of humanity's great narratives, this is a book that will captivate both the general reader and the scholar... It is a book for our time, a deep history that allows us to imagine our way into the future.' -Kim Mahood, Australian Book Review

'Here is archaeology as passion; fierce and relevant. Here are dizzying meditations on time and human purpose. Here are the complex relationships between the hidden traces in the ground and the politics of the day... Deep Time Dreaming reads like a family tree of the hardy eccentrics and visionaries who defied a prevailing understanding to re-invent a discipline, to look at the land with new eyes and to teach us an appropriate kind of awe in which to behold it.' -Jock Serong, Meanjin

'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 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. Both ancient and modern Australia have here found a truly worthy historian.' -Iain McCalman