Indigenous Australian Stories and Sea-Level Change

Title
Indigenous Australian Stories and Sea-Level Change
Publication Date
2014
Author(s)
Reid, Nicholas J
( author )
OrcID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1055-1458
Email: nreid@une.edu.au
UNE Id une-id:nreid
Nunn, Patrick
Sharpe, Margaret
Editor
Editor(s): Patrick Heinrich and Nicholas Ostler
Type of document
Conference Publication
Language
en
Entity Type
Publication
Publisher
Foundation for Endangered Languages
Place of publication
Bath, United Kingdom
UNE publication id
une:18869
Abstract
Oral traditions, especially contrasted with written history, are typically portrayed as inaccurate. Commenting on native title claims in the US, Simic (2000) made the specific claim: "As a general rule, unwritten legends that refer to events more than 1,000 years in the past contain little, if any, historical truth". So can preliterate Indigenous languages tell us anything factual about the distant past, or does the transmission of historical facts become inevitably corrupted? Changes in sea levels around the Australian coast are now well established. Marine geographers can now point to specific parts of the Australian coast and know with some confidence what the sea levels were at a particular time before the present. This paper reports on a substantial body of Australian Aboriginal stories that appear to represent genuine and unique observations of post-glacial increases in sea level, at time depths that range from about 13,400-7,500 years BP. This paper makes the case that endangered Indigenous languages can be repositories for factual knowledge across time depths far greater than previously imagined, forcing a rethink of the ways in which such traditions have been dismissed.
Link
Citation
Indigenous Languages: Their Value to the Community. Proceedings of the 18th FEL Conference, p. 82-87
ISBN
9780956021069
Start page
82
End page
87

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