Standing Stones Down Under: the first annual oration to the Glen Innes Celtic Studies Group and the Standing Stones Management Committee

Abstract

In the autumn of 1992, at that similar Celtic Festival time, I was privileged to be researching and working here in Glen Innes with the late John Tregurtha, as we created together a celebratory and scholarly paper of record, it then being entitled 'Standing of the Array: A Celtic Tradition Re-enacted at Glen Innes, New South Wales'; and it was one which would soon afterwards be published in the national annual journal of the Australian Folklore Association, Australian Folklore, in its Number 7, (September 1992, pp. 69 - 76). This act of reporting was, perhaps, the first Glen Innes-set scholarly paper in a humanities field to appear almost immediately in one international cultural bibliography of world scholarship status, thus further publicising a remarkable and brilliantly focused inter-disciplinary achievement that had taken place here because of the enormous pride in the Celtic heritage of this region, and from the related commemorative actions taken in consequence. Indeed, by that time, Glen Innes had, most appropriately - and for a range of interconnected reasons that will become clear - then offered itself, and then been duly selected, as the location for a unique henge raising, one deliberately patterned from Glen Innes' several possible and the far northern Celtic region's model settings, and certainly inspired by the ancient one at the Bridge of Brodgar in the Orkney Isles. As is well known throughout the scholarly world, the ancient Celts had there raised various aligned stones at accessible sites as mnemonic calendars to mark the season - when to sow, and when to harvest - and they had later developed a complex and persisting religious significance for all these activities.