Australia’s human history began over 60,000 years ago.  The continent has cause to celebrate the oldest continuing cultures in human history.  In this book, Billy Griffiths has explored sites that give evidence of how ancient peoples, through language, song and story, harnessed flame to create eco-systems, survived droughts and floods, and adapted to changing climatic conditions.  He draws first on the work of archaeologist John Mulvaney whose life project has been to understand the depth of Australia’s humanity.  The book investigates a twin revolution: the dramatic discovery of Australia’s deep history and the reassert of Aboriginal cultural identity in the second half of the twentieth century.  The Dreaming is neither ‘time’, ‘history’ nor ‘religion’.  Nor is it myth or legend where ‘time is irrelevant, as in a dream’.   The book illustrates how the Dreaming describes a varied, contoured and continually transforming tradition.   To dream of deep time … is ‘an act of wonder – a dilation of the commonplace – that challenges us to infer meaning from the cryptic residue of former worlds.  It is a scale of think the propels us into a global perspective and allows us to see ourselves as a species’.

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