Abstract
We take up the challenge to extend the ‘archive of mnemonic practices’ beyond recent histories of violence by facilitating a dialogue between scholarship on deep history and the fourth wave of memory studies, both emerging under the sign of the Anthropocene. In so doing, we engage with the problem of transmission as it has emerged in both fields. Works in cultural memory studies provide us with compelling ways of thinking through mediated practices of transmission, but they are limited by their focus on the recent past and on encultured technologies of memory that primarily reflect the European origins of the field. Studies of deep history, which engage transmission among Indigenous communities, by contrast, tend to rely on an account of transmission as precise replication, oftentimes over hundreds of generations. To reconsider and theorize mediated practices of transmission, we draw on the concept of the deep present as formulated within ethnomusicology. This term describes a present in which Aboriginal culture-work and performance both transmits memory of the deep past and evokes that deep past itself, activating it today. We consider two public installations as examples of remembrance of the deep past in urban Warrane/Sydney – bara by Judy Watson and Virtual Warrane by Brett Leavy – each of which is of Country in a way that connects memory over time and activates a deep present. We argue that these instances of memory in the deep present might offer ways of reconsidering the possibilities of a decolonizing future.
Keywords
‘History, whether it is of the present or of other periods, must accept that it is history in the present.’ ‘[D]eep time . . . is a big, big story. The big stuff goes forever, time ropes and loops and is never straight, that’s the real story of time.’
Introduction
A special issue that proposes to take stock of memory studies invites us to consider the state of the field in the present moment and to propose future directions. Of course, any such attempt must consider not only our particular historical moment – a conjuncture marked by climate change, species extinction, structural economic injustice, entrenched racism, and patriarchy among other forces – but also location (Collins et al., 2020; Kennedy and Radstone, 2013; Radstone, 2011). As has often been observed, memory studies has its conceptual origins in Europe. When Astrid Erll took stock of the field in 2011, she identified three phases: the foundational work of Warburg and Halbwachs in the 1920s and 1930s; the national memory studies of the 1980s and 1990s, exemplified by Pierra Nora’s work on lieux de mémoire and Jan and Aleida Assmann’s work on cultural memory; and a third stage on transnational and transcultural memory (Erll, 2011). Although concepts originating from Europe have percolated through the field to shape the study of memory in other regions (Fabre and O’Meally, 1994), cross-fertilizations from the global north and the global south have been emerging. Viewing memory studies from our location on the Australian continent – home to the oldest continuous culture on the planet, and from a perspective on the European periphery – what is striking is the persistent presentism of the field (Hartog, 2015 [2003]; Rigney, 2018), a presentism which extends to calls to decolonize.
While we are sympathetic to these calls, many works on decolonization or decoloniality take as their starting point European colonialism from the late fifteenth century, and the emergence of colonial modernity and the nation-state (Azoulay, 2019; Mignolo, 2011; Taylor, 2020). In so doing, they entrench Eurocentrism even as they aspire to decentre Europe, thereby limiting the possible scope of decolonization. As the editors of Everywhen: Australia and the Language of Deep History observe, given the global challenges the world is facing, ‘it seems even less appropriate to start any human story with Europeans and their so-called discoveries of the New World’ (McGrath and Rademaker, 2023: 13). They propose, instead, that the emerging field of deep history offers a framework that can create space for engagements with Indigenous knowledge and the transmission of the deep past, and that invites us to query the linear temporality of the West as self-evident. In this field, problems of scale and form emerge from the relatively recent expansion of the purview of historical scholarship (Aslanian et al., 2013) both to people allegedly ‘without history’ (Wolf, 1982), and to longer swathes of time – drawing on sources and methods of archaeology, anthropology, genomics, and so on – to tell fuller histories of humanity (Shryock and Smail, 2011; Smail, 2007). While initially spurred by postcolonial critique, the growth of what is termed deep history or the history of the species (Bashford, 2018; Jonsson, 2013) can also be attributed to an emergent understanding of an Anthropocene, which demands that we consider both the species as historical agent and the larger timescale that makes thinking in terms of geological eras possible.
In this article, we propose to bring the field of deep history into dialogue with memory studies as a means of moving beyond not only the presentism that characterizes memory studies but also the ‘settler colonial present’ (Veracini, 2015). In this Anthropocene moment that coincides with aspirations towards decoloniality, we contend that memory studies would benefit from awareness of – and engagement with – the emerging field of deep history and its concern with the deep past. In Australia, that deep past is an Indigenous past, one which lays claim to at least 60,000 years of living in this place. Research on the deep past in Australia is often conducted through collaborations between non-Indigenous and Indigenous researchers and communities, and provides a crucial avenue for representing Indigenous ways of knowing and remembering the past. Of particular significance, deep history offers a mode of engaging with memories of Indigenous story, law and authority (Watson, 2018: 15–17; Kwaymullina, 2017: 9) that speak to survival and resurgence (Alfred and Corntassel, 2005) rather than the trauma, violence and suffering that are so often the subject of research in memory studies (Huyssen, 2000; Rigney, 2018).
Although deep history brings issues of temporality, historicities and scale to prominence, the field as it relates to Indigenous pasts in Australia would benefit, we propose, from a clearer articulation of the concepts of memory, mediation and transmission. In what follows we offer an assessment, both sympathetic and critical, of attempts to account for transmission of Indigenous cultural memory, mediated in oral, pictorial and musical traditions, through deep time. While we recognize that other researchers reject the concept of cultural memory as unable to convey the complexity of the contemporary works being produced by Indigenous artists referencing their long habitation on the Australian continent (Collins et al., 2020), we take a different approach. Our aim is to create a framework for an interdisciplinary and international dialogue within memory studies and between memory studies and deep history. Building on important work on transmission in memory studies and in studies of Indigenous cultures, we aim to consider the concept of memory transmission beyond presentism, and how transmission might be accounted for in the vastly differing cultural contexts signified by cultural memory studies and deep history. To that end, we consider memory as mediated by and through rock paintings, songcycles, oral story and geological features of Country. Country emerges here both as a mnemonic landscape and as a model for transmission. We also consider two examples of how the deep past is being brought into present memory in Australia through strategically located public art projects. The dialogue that we engage in here requires imaginative engagement, openness, and ‘resonant listening’ to consider how traces from the deep past are mediated and active in the present.
Cultural memory studies and deep history
For most readers of this journal, memory studies will need no introduction. But we suggest that returning briefly to reconsider the development of the field will be useful – especially as it pertains to the key concepts of collective memory, cultural memory, mnemonic transmission, and mediation – to locate their emergence and to establish a position from which to trace their resonance in a different context. The field, which emerged in Europe in the 1980s, takes its point of origin from the foundational work of French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs and German art historian Aby Warburg, writing in the 1920s and 1930s. Halbwachs conducted pioneering work on collective memory, proposing that individuals form their memories, even personal memories, in relation to ‘social frames of remembering’ – a model in which identity, memory and territory were tightly knotted (Halbwachs, 1980 [1950]). By contrast, Warburg was interested in the relationship between memory and the cultural objects in which a culture’s memory was stored.
Building on the work of Halbwachs and Warburg, Jan and Aleida Assmann introduced two concepts – communicative memory and cultural memory – to develop a systematic approach to memory and transmission (J Assmann, 1995). Thinking through his expertise in ancient Egyptian civilization, Jan Assmann (1995: 127) proposed that ‘communicative memory’ – a form of collective memory handed down through everyday conversations and interactions, often within a family – is the remit of oral history and has a ‘limited temporal horizon’ of three to four generations. But by imposing a temporal frame of 80 to at most 100 years, he bracketed questions of oral transmission that continue over hundreds and even thousands of years – a core concern in the field of deep history. Assmann contended that once we leave the realm of communicative memory, we enter into the domain of cultural memory. Here he turned to Warburg, who wanted to reconstruct the pictorial memory of Western civilization through studying the ‘mnemonic functions of objectivized culture’ – that is, the memory of a culture stored in and communicated through cultural forms (posters, songs, visual and graphic arts and, today, new digital forms of social media and video art). With Warburg, Assmann recognized ‘the power of cultural objectivation’ to ‘stabilize’ cultural memory, in some situations over thousands of years (Assmann, 1995: 129). The conception of objectivized cultural forms as carriers of memory extends to forms found in Aboriginal cultures over thousands of years, such as Dreamings, rituals, rock paintings, songcycles and the landscape itself.
The transmission of communicative memory in everyday culture was presumed to occur as a matter of course, while the transmission of cultural memory depends upon particular objects not only being collected and archived, but also activated. Distinguishing between archive and canon, Aleida Assmann (2010) proposed that an object only shapes cultural memory if it belongs to a recognized ‘canon’ or tradition of literature, music or film. Ann Rigney describes this as ‘canonical memory’, in contrast to the more capacious category of cultural memory, which centres questions regarding processes of cultural mediation and circulation in shaping memory (Rigney, 2015). To become active as cultural memory, an object has to be kept alive by being continuously remediated, circulated and incorporated into new memory. Without ongoing circulation and remediation, material in archives or in the public sphere, such as monuments, may either remain ‘inert’ until it finds its moment and becomes relevant in the present (Rigney, 2015), or become ephemeral, slipping away and out of memory altogether.
Practices of mediation and remediation are inevitably shaped by technologies of memory. The term ‘technology’ combines two meanings, referring both to ‘the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry’ and to ‘machinery and devices developed from scientific knowledge’ (New Oxford American Dictionary, 2010). In the latter sense, writing, the printing press, photography, sound recording and digital media are all ‘technologies of memory’ that foster the sharing and circulation of memory, and thereby contribute to cultural and collective memory (Sturken, 2008: 75; Keightley and Pickering, 2014: 579). While some scholars take photographic technology as indicative of the ‘complex interrelationship between contemporary concepts of memory and modernity’ (Sturken, 2008: 75; Lydon and Oxenham, 2021), others consider ‘oral cultures’ to have developed and worked with sophisticated mnemonic technologies.
In her research on practices of memory in ancient oral cultures, for example, Lynn Kelly (2016) identifies a ‘memory code’ that enabled members of the group to remember vast bodies of information. She describes song and dance as favoured technologies of memory in the oral cultures of Aboriginal Australia; knowledge about animals, insects, plants, bodies of water, geography – all of which are vital for survival – are encoded in songs and dances which ‘combine practical and magical aspects’ (Kelly, 2016: 4). Songs, she writes, ‘reinforce details of animal behaviour’ and this knowledge, in turn, is used by hunters to plan strategies which ‘enhance the likely success of the hunt’ (Kelly, 2016: 4). Kelly contends that the mnemonic techniques that Aboriginal Australians developed in the songlines are ‘complex version[s] of the technique usually associated with the classical [Greek] orators’ (Kelly, 18; see also Yates, 1966). Her argument, like Jan Assmann’s (2011) research on the memory cultures of ancient Egypt and Greece, builds on a reading of Walter Ong’s foundational insights into oral cultures, though Kelly speculates that the memory code she identifies stretches back well beyond the timespan of around 3000 years with which Assmann works. 1 Mnemonic practices such as song, dance and storytelling, which intensively engage the human body and brain to encode memory, are sometimes referred to as ‘soft technologies’ (Barwick, 2023: 109).
Considering technologies of memory invites us to turn from examining objects of memory to looking to the imbrication of objects in practices of memory. We might consider rock paintings, for instance, many of which endure across thousands of years in Australia, as forms of cultural memory. Maintained as part of Aboriginal practices of caring for or looking after Country, rock paintings are activated by senior people with a deep knowledge of their meaning (May et al., 2021: 299) through song, dance and other techniques including ‘refreshing’ or ‘repainting’ images (Marshall and Tacon, 2014: 215; O’Connor et al., 2008). The repainting of Wandjina paintings on Worrorra, Wunambal and Ngarinyin Country in northwest Australia, for example, might mean re-tracing and identically reproducing earlier work, or it may include adding new motifs, often covering over older motifs; in either case, these sites are kept alive through mediation and active engagement. Given their vital role in cultural survival, David Mowaljarlai and others question whether rock paintings are best understood as ‘art’ – that is, as ‘ancient’ objects to be viewed and studied from a detached perspective. As Mowaljarlai contends: ‘We have never thought of our rock-paintings as “Art”[.] To us they are IMAGES. IMAGES with ENERGIES that keep us ALIVE – EVERY PERSON, EVERYTHING WE STAND ON, ARE MADE FROM, EAT AND LIVE ON’ (Mowaljarlai et al., 1988: 691). On his description, the rocks, the rock paintings, the earth, the sky, the spirits, the people – taken as a whole with moving parts – share the features of a human-nonhuman assemblage, described by Jane Bennett (2010: 23) as ‘ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts’. Invested with ‘energies’ and life-affirming capacities, the rock paintings, in their vital materiality, have agency; they act with and on other elements in the assemblage, involving constant making and remaking and encouraging different capacities from moment to moment (Kennedy et al., 2013: 48).
Such paintings create obligations for engagement and activation that enliven memory and represent its message in the present. Mowaljarlai wrote that the images ‘were put down for us by our Creator, Wandjina’, and that therefore ‘[w]e should dance those images back into the earth in corroborrees. That would make us learn the story, to put new life into those IMAGES’ (Mowaljarlai et al., 1988: 691) Cultural memory, then, is activated through ceremony that expresses its meaning through song, dance and story. This is a practice that pre-dates the Wandjina paintings, which are often superimposed on earlier images known as Gwion Gwions. David Welch (2015: 219) has observed that figures and their material culture depicted in some of the Gwion Gwions, first painted at least 12,000 years ago, closely resemble photographic images from the early twentieth century of men in the same region dancing with head-dresses, spear-throwers, leaves and feathers. This similarity suggests the long-term persistence and transmission of certain norms – postures, behaviours, actions – derived from rock paintings as objects of cultural memory (Veth et al., 2021: 199, 205). Thus, it makes little sense to date rock paintings to a discrete range, some thousands or tens of thousands of years ago; their activation through the mediating practices of repainting and ceremony represents a structure of transmission that renders them objects Aboriginal people know have been ‘produced at both many and all times’ (Harper et al., 2020: 3).
Trauma and transmission in cultural memory studies and musicology
In cultural memory studies, transmission has emerged as a problem, rather than as a self-evident process, in the wake of genocidal events which constitute a traumatic rupture to collective memory, identity and the lives and lifeways of communities. Here, transmission has been theorized most explicitly with regard to the Holocaust, with trauma providing a foundational concept. Scholars, critics and artists – including children of survivors and members of the post-generations – have struggled to account for the transmission of memory across generations when the worlds of their parents’ and grandparents’ have been utterly destroyed. Taking Art Spiegelman’s Maus as an exemplary case, Marianne Hirsch developed the concept of postmemory to name the experience of the post-generation of survivors, who have been possessed by memories of ‘an irretrievably lost world’ that they have not directly experienced but have nonetheless inherited – often through memoirs, narratives, photographs or bodily behaviours (Hirsch, 2008). She contends that in ‘extreme circumstances’ involving traumatic rupture, ‘memory can be transmitted to those who were not actually there to live an event’ in the form of postmemory, which ‘approximates memory in its affective force’. She defines postmemory, which differs from experiential memory, ‘as a structure of inter- and trans-generational transmission of traumatic knowledge and experience’ (Hirsch, 2008: 106); it is multidirectional, moving along vertical and horizontal axes.
Although some scholars have objected to Hirsch’s use of the term ‘memory’ to describe the relationship of the second generation to the past experienced by their parents’ generation, she insists that it shares memory’s affective intensity. As she explains, the ‘descendants of survivors . . . of massive traumatic events connect so deeply to the previous generation’s remembrances of the past that they need to call that connection memory’ (p. 106). The structure of postmemory, Hirsch contends,
In this context, though not drawing on the idiom of memory studies, ethnomusicologist Sally Treloyn shares with memory scholars a concern with the impact of traumatic rupture on transmission. Specifically, she explores how Aboriginal songcycles – which we take to refer to ‘stories of a continuous past-present embedded in landscapes of mobility, sites being revisited and reenergized through song, dance, and art’ (McGrath and Rademaker, 2023: 17) – are passed on across lines of transmission fractured by settler colonialism. These, we propose, can be read as a cultural form through which memory has been shared over hundreds of generations in an enduring process of transmission. As part of efforts to eradicate Aboriginal culture, colonizers systematically punished Aboriginal people for singing songs in language and for congregating to share song and dance; Treloyn (2022: 1) describes restrictions as ‘tool[s] of coloniality’. Taking the concept of trauma as a starting point, she observes that the ‘history of colonial suppression is experienced as a form of trauma that is at once intergenerational (passed down from one generation to the next) and transgenerational (experienced collectively across generations)’. Treloyn (2022: 14, 18) draws on the work of Jiman and Bundjalung trauma researcher Judy Atkinson to explore the entanglement of song ‘with “trauma trails” that “run across country and generations”’ and argues that settler colonial attacks on transmission have been countered by the ‘complex and multidirectional flows [of song knowledge] among generations’ (p. 18).
In this work, Treloyn contributes to a body of research that has, since the 1980s, contested the presumption that transmission occurs primarily along patrilineal lines, from father to son. Instead, she contends that understanding structures of transmission, as they transform rather than simply reproduce the archive, requires attending to place and Country, to lineage, gender and kinship, and to the wider, emergent contexts through which knowledge passes. To that end, she explores both intergenerational matrilineal transmission, and innovation within generations as a means of exploring how song culture adapts to changing circumstances and responds to new technologies. This dynamism and innovation, through enlivening engagement with ‘traces of ancestral material in archival collections’ (Bracknell, 2019), is similarly the subject of Noongar musicologist Clint Bracknell’s work. For Bracknell, it is through engagement with materials housed in archives that songs remain part of musical tradition. This work and that of Treloyn share with Hirsch a focus on how memory is transmitted after traumatic ruptures of the relatively recent past. We return later to the question of the transmission of song culture from the deep past to the present.
The problem of transmission in deep history
Inscribing the deep past into history has the agenda of restoring ‘historicity’ to those ‘peoples without history’ (Smail, 2015: xi; 2022: 234). But this move may present a gift that not all Indigenous peoples seek. Historians and anthropologists working with Aboriginal communities in Australia have described some of the ways that deep historical methods tend to universalize a historicity that may seem incommensurate with Indigenous narrations. Ann McGrath (2015: 2–4), for instance, notes that the metaphors of depth at the heart of this field tend to distance the reader from a past understood as long ago and far away. For many Aboriginal people, by contrast, the past is experienced as an immediate part of a living contemporary landscape; as Country and as memory. Minyangbal man Mark Yettica-Paulson writes that, for Indigenous peoples, ‘ancient memory is not difficult to access’. Indigenous knowledges, rather, ‘make the ancient intimate’, connecting ‘a contemporary reality to an ancient narrative and bring[ing] that ancient narrative into close relationship with our current reality through ceremony’ (Yettica-Paulson, 2014: 251) This proposition, along with diverse other resonances of the past, suggests that we might adopt an approach to deep history that takes that ‘ancient memory’ seriously (Rademaker and Silverstein, 2022). Concepts of communicative and cultural memory speak clearly, if unevenly, to these contexts.
Acknowledging this immediate experience of the deep past necessitates considering the epistemological implications of Indigenous knowledges, those memories for which Aboriginal people hold responsibility. Introducing a 1980 compilation of Aboriginal historical knowledge, Riratjingu elder Wandjuk Marika commented that ‘scientists can give you a small story of our origins possibly 40,000 years ago, but we can tell you many more’ (Marika in Isaacs, 1980: 5). As Jennifer Isaacs observes: ‘[t]his history is not lost: it has been retained in the memories of successive generations of Aboriginal people and passed on through the rich oral tradition of song-poetry and legend’ (Isaacs, 1980: 5). Here memory includes oral storytelling, song-poetry and legend – all forms of what memory scholars call ‘cultural memory’ – that is, the mediation of knowledge about the past and, in Aboriginal culture, about the Spirit Beings, through cultural forms. And yet, many non-Indigenous scholars puzzle over how best to account for the ways these memories represent, mediate and transmit deep history over thousands of years to the present (Rademaker, 2021). With few exceptions, deep historians tend to share Isaacs’ presumption that both the category of memory and its transmission are self-evident, rather than analytic categories that require theorization. Transmission is central to acts of transferring the norms embedded in memory over time, demanding that we think carefully about the processes by which the deep past recurs today.
The question of transmission appears most prominently in deep histories of Australia that set out to demonstrate the longevity or duration of Indigenous memory. These works usually understand deep memories through a method sometimes termed geomythology: an approach to ‘myths’ that reads them as encultured efforts by ‘preliterate peoples’ to explain environmental or geological processes or events that they witness (Masse et al., 2007; Nunn, 2018: 24; Vitaliano, 1973, 2007). Engaging, then, with memories of climate change and cataclysm, these studies aim to refute suggestions that memories can survive for no more than a few centuries at most and instead insist on the endurance of memory over millennia, since the end of the Pleistocene, for instance. This work is accompanied by claims that Indigenous knowledge holds authority because it preserves eyewitness accounts – or explanations of events witnessed – largely unchanged, over an extraordinary duration: this is represented as a sign of a continuous culture that has survived tens of thousands of years until today. Such claims trouble the narrowed scale of much work in memory studies. They emerge in the context of ‘growing consciousness of the [present as] Anthropocene’, which Stef Craps et al. (2018: 500) recently identified as marking the advent of a fourth phase in the field. This, he suggests, impels a move beyond an incessant focus on recent memories to embrace a scalar expansion into what we call deep history or what others have termed ‘slow memory’ (Wüstenberg, 2023), demanding that we decentre the humanism of memory studies and instead think ecologically (Kennedy, 2017). In this moment of environmental change, the Anthropocene frame has induced many to consider the deep memories of climate change that might connect events prior not just to the Anthropocene but the Holocene and Pleistocene as well – a time and temporality other than that of colonization.
In a highly influential paper in deep history, Patrick Nunn and Nicholas Reid (2016: 13) drew on the publications of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglo-Australian missionaries, ethnographers, linguists, and others, seeking out records of stories provided to them by Aboriginal ‘informants’ and featuring coastal inundation. They took 21 of these sometimes sacred, sometimes ‘ordinary’, Dreaming stories, translated by those recorders into written text, and argued that they ‘incorporate information about actual events’, specifically cultural ‘memories of times when the ocean rose across the various parts of the continental shelf to which they refer’ (pp. 13, 37). 2 By correlating these stories with the timing of marine transgression of the coastal regions where these stories are held, they date their origin to between 7250 and 13,070 years ago (p. 38). These are, then, ‘some of the world’s earliest extant human memories’ (p. 42). Exemplifying this method, Nunn and Reid (2016: 16–17) write of the story of the drowning of the Backstairs Passage, which separates Kangaroo Island from mainland South Australia. The ‘most detailed’ version, told to anthropologist Ronald Berndt in 1939 or 1940 by a Yaraldi man, Karloan, recounts a story about Ngurunderi, a ‘creative hero’ of ancestral times. Nunn and Reid draw our attention to the part of the story in which Ngurunderi reportedly pursued his two wives until finding them walking from Tjirbuk (Blowhole Creek) to what is now Kangaroo Island. There, Ngurunderi called the waters to fall upon them. The rushing waters – ‘so rough, so strong, were the tempestuous waves’, (Berndt, 1940: 181) which ‘arose in a terrible flood, and swept over the hills with fury’ (Taplin, 1874: 44) – drove the two wives further south and transformed them into Meralang (The Pages Islands). And the waters remained in place, forever separating Kangaroo Island from the mainland. This part of the story, Nunn and Reid (2016: 40) argue, is a container for the memory of rising sea levels as glaciers melted at the end of the ice age some 10,080–10,950 years ago. 3
Nunn and Reid’s approach is framed around the question of longevity, which seeks to demonstrate the validity of orally transmitted social memory well beyond the duration previously considered possible. One can find similar methods leading to similar arguments – regarding memories of volcanic activity (Matchan et al., 2020; Wilkie et al., 2020) and astronomical events (Fuller and Hamacher, 2017: 349) – in other studies of deep time memories in Australia, albeit at times with more circumspect conclusions. One might advance a number of responses to this method, including a critique of the notion that Aboriginal knowledge of the past must derive from observation rather than induction, which, Bruno David (2002: 91) writes, ‘belittles the ability of Indigenous peoples to observe and interpret their own surroundings’. Determining the origins of knowledge – whether witnessed or inferential – is an uncertain business. Regardless, as Chris Ballard and others have argued, the question of longevity turns our attention away from more interesting questions around story. Enquiring into longevity involves testing the accuracy of oral traditions ‘from the perspectives of a universalising chronology and historicity’ (Ballard, 2021: 572), rather than seeking to appreciate these memories on their own terms and understanding what their narrators are seeking to communicate. Interpreting memory through a lens of confirmable (or un-confirmable) accuracy neatly resolves rather than sits with problems of form and transmission, an approach which may create space for exchange between different ways of ‘knowing the past’ (Roberts et al., 2020).
Here we set aside these critiques to instead enquire into the account of transmission as faithful reproduction, articulated in these debates over longevity. While Nunn and others point to memories dating back tens of thousands of years, other scholars, including David Henige (2009: 201) argue that oral tradition can be transmitted reasonably intact for only four or five generations at most, after which ‘random change begins to occur’ – a timeframe roughly consistent with that of Assmann’s communicative memory. Henige contends that across ‘hundreds or even thousands of transmissions’ it becomes impossible to distinguish ‘snatches of accuracy’ from the ‘accretions of centuries’ (Henige, 2009: 132–3) – presuming that a memory must be transmitted unchanged for it to be said to have any fealty to the original account. The question of whether a memory has been transmitted ‘intact’ over generations is facilitated by the adoption of longevity as the central research problem, which Henige concedes forecloses more compelling research (Henige, 2009: 129).
For Henige (2009: 145), the proposition that the memory of a rising sea could be ‘sustained in tradition through five to seven millennia of total irrelevance must be held to lack verisimilitude’. By contrast, for others writing about deep history and memory in Australia, it is compelling. Their accounts of transmission rest upon the idea that Aboriginal peoples prior to British invasion memorized that which they needed to know to ensure their survival. In the work of Lynne Kelly, Nunn and others, Aboriginal people transformed orally transmitted memories into stories tied to landscape, or songlines, which work to organize that landscape into a memory space, ensuring ‘replication fidelity’ over long periods to present an essential resource from which people can draw at moments of need (Kelly, 2016: 14–15; Nunn and Reid, 2016: 41). Understanding songlines and the stories they contain as a memory technique or code (Neale and Kelly, 2020) constitutes the problem of transmission, then, as a question of why a particular event or place, such as a waterhole, might be considered essential for survival and hence its memory transformed into narrative form as part of a songline or Dreaming track. As an approach to transmission, this account contends that memory techniques enable the preservation of stories over thousands of years, and regards change as a loss of intactness.
Whether Aboriginal memories are imagined as accurately or inaccurately reproducing impressions of events or processes that took place sometime in the (deep) past, both sides of this confined debate work with a similar account of transmission – that is, as precise replication over hundreds of generations. The difference between them turns on questions of Aboriginal capacity. These accounts of transmission demand further theoretical attention, as do similar accounts in other presentations of deep history, whether or not the question of duration or longevity is central. Problematically, such works deploy a method of interpreting stories as myths that each comprises books in a Dreaming Library. This sets for researchers the task of penetrating through what are represented as the inventions of the Dreaming that were designed to make the story more transmissible to access a core that comprises an accurate memory of observed environmental change (Nunn, 2018: 50–3). Viewed through the lens of memory studies, they approach cultural memory by seeking to strip the mediating cultural forms away to find the ‘real’ communicative memory within. By contrast, we suggest that culture, particularly that of storytelling and transmission, insofar as it is the site of change and reproduction over time through the re-presentation of story between specifically located actors, ought to be the very subject of our consideration of deep memories.
To put the issue of culture at the centre of enquiry into transmission requires a shift of focus from questions of mimesis and accuracy to questions of cultural practice – of memory in action and the vital ‘entanglement’ of people, place, story and memory (Corr, 2019: 198). The alternative approaches that we explore below shift the focus from questions of representation to questions of what culture and memory do and what effects they might have. Moving away from enquiring into fidelity or intactness, they present other approaches to transmission which explore the ways memory reiterates relationships with events or processes of deep time, considering the ways people activate and draw upon memory to articulate themselves today. This is memory alive, not static as is indicated by the analogy of the book or library.
Transmission: from the colonial present to the deep present
While the above work tends to adopt that linear approach to transmission as mimesis, others, including Treloyn, explore enlivened and multidirectional musical transmission. Where Treloyn focuses on conditions of transformation in the aftermath of settler colonialism, musicologist Linda Barwick is concerned with the ongoing transmission of songcycles from the deep past. Like Treloyn, she draws attention to Aboriginal approaches to time as ‘relational and process-oriented rather than linear and genealogical’ and tightly related to place (Barwick, 2023: 95). In her work on a Warlpiri women’s ceremonial song – known as yawulyu – about edible seeds, she describes performances of the yawulyu songcycle in which, like the remediation of rock-paintings we discussed earlier, ‘women respeak and reenact ancestral words and actions over the course of many hours of singing, dancing, painting, and exegesis of ceremonial knowledge’ (p. 96). 4 Through the act of ceremonial singing, contemporary performers embody ‘the voice of the ancestor’ – a voice understood here as both forebears beyond the horizon of living memory and world-creating Dreaming beings – ‘bringing ancestral power into the contemporary world’ (p. 99). Ceremonial singing, as such, is an active means of transmitting – and shaping – cultural memory across generations.
Significantly, Barwick contends that non-linear temporal structures in music, together with practices of re-enacting and remembering the past in the present through embodied performance, may contribute to ‘time-collapse’, almost making all history ‘now’ (p. 93). This collapse bears some similarities to the concept of the ‘here-now’ that Collins et al. (2020: 851) develop to describe the performance not of remembering pasts but of ‘alive-ness’. Yet the ‘now’ for Barwick is not entirely collapsed into a singular form; her description of the role of sequence, and the narrative scope inherent in multiple ordering possibilities, foregrounds the way performers draw creatively on the deep past to imagine and constitute the present (Barwick, 2023: 97). We can understand this process of transmission as constituting a ‘deep present’ in that ‘ancestral power continues to reside in and activate the experiential world’ (Barwick, 2023: 94). Similarly, for Yamatji art historian Stephen Gilchrist, transmission is fundamental. The Dreaming ‘does not merely preserve the past. Rather, it speaks of eternal becoming . . . made alive through both its immediate and continuing transmission. Gesturing insistently toward the future, the Dreaming pushes ancestral memory into the present’ (Gilchrist, 2016: 19).
Performance is alive, active, inherently changeable (Taylor, 2020). Based on analysis of yawulyu performances, Barwick (2023: 96) suggests that the genre of ancestral songcycle performance can be viewed as a ‘soft technology’. Song is an ‘intangible technology of memory and emotion’ that ‘“intra-acts” with other practices to enable adaptation to changing environments (e.g., social, physical)’ (p. 109), and facilitate ‘group synchrony’ and ‘group bonding, thus promoting intergenerational collaboration’ (Barwick, 2023: 109, citing Clayton, Sager and Will). In other words, song (including dance) is a means of ingraining memory in the body, and in ‘strengthening identification with the group’s clans and totems’; as such, it shares features of Halbwach’s ‘social frameworks of remembrance’ (Halbwachs, 1980 [1950]). This conception of song as a ‘soft technology’ – communicating identity, memory and emotion – is a useful contrast to more rigid approaches of ‘checking the evidence’ of oral memory against the geological record at a given point in time, to confirm the accuracy of oral memory (Ginzburg, 1991).
Like Hirsch and Treloyn, Barwick is sensitive to the vertical and horizontal structures of transmission over generations. Like Treloyn, she draws our attention to how ‘patterns of flexibility’ work together with ‘tightly structured elements’ (Barwick, 2023: 107). This ‘pervasive aesthetic of combinatorial flexibility’ (p. 108) is shaped through the ‘autonomy and authority’ of the women song leaders, who ‘with a lifetime of performance experience and deep knowledge of the relevant narratives’ (p. 107) – are conduits of transmission of the Dreaming Law. The circumstances of intergenerational transmission also ‘foster innovation . . . as younger generations step up to contribute their own understandings as they become song leaders in their turn’ (p. 107).
In addition, and of particular relevance for our analysis of approaches to the deep past, Barwick is attentive to the entanglement between ‘song, human practices, and the environment’ (p. 97) over long timeframes. In studying musical culture in relation to deep time, she draws on ecological models. Specifically, Barwick considers how ‘the flexibility and adaptiveness of human inventiveness’ that characterizes musical culture ‘interlocks and is entangled with other forms of flexibility and adaptiveness that take place across different orders of timescale’ (p. 112) – including ecological change. To that end, she draws on the work of philosopher Manuel DeLanda to propose that songs, like languages, should be approached on a non-linear, layered, geological model that recognizes and incorporates the place of ‘flows’ (e.g. of lavas and magmas) in producing ‘structures’ (rocks, mountains) that ‘inhabit the geosphere’. DeLanda adapts this model to linguistic structures, which result from the ‘lengthy sedimentation of sounds, words and syntactical constructions’, consolidated ‘into structures over centuries’ (Barwick, 2023: 113, citing DeLanda). Barwick extends this model to song culture as a means of exploring the relationship between flow and structure, and processes of adapting to changes in the human and non-human environment. Her model of transmission thus prioritizes flexibility, adaptation and change over time, rather than seeking to correlate oral stories to specific environmental events such as a rise in the sea level. The deep present, for Barwick, is less compromised by the ‘accretions of centuries’ than it is constituted by the flows of millennia of social, environmental and geological change. The illusion of solidity is revealed as one of slow but constant flux when one thinks across deep time.
Imagining deep time: decolonizing public memory
Memory’s claim is not only to be ‘faithful to the past’; memory also makes claims in and for the present (Ricouer, 2004: 21). In Australia today, the concepts of the ‘deep past’ and ‘deep history’ are being extended from the domain of academic fields such as archaeology and history into public culture and memory, mediated and disseminated in cultural forms including museum exhibitions, theatre productions, public art, sculptures and monuments. Here we consider two examples of the remembrance of the deep past in the present. The first is a new monument, bara, designed by Waanyi artist Judy Watson, and unveiled in 2022 as part of a cultural heritage project, The Eora Journey. Comprised of seven public art projects by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists, The Eora Journey aims to bring to life the deep past of First Nations people in Sydney and its waterways. Activating the past in the present, the project aims ‘to reactivate the knowledge of specific places and events in Aboriginal history at key sites within the city’ as a means of achieving ‘recognition in the public domain’ and ‘celebrat[ing] the living culture and heritage of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in Sydney’ (see Watson, 2022). Roughly six metres high and wide, bara stands on the Tarpeian Precinct Lawn above Dubbagullee (Bennelong Point), at the base of what is now the Royal Botanic Gardens, like a sentinel overlooking the harbour.
Watson, who frequently takes inspiration from and works with material artefacts and traces of Indigenous cultures held by museums, based bara on shell hooks used by Eora women – traditional custodians of the Sydney foreshore – which she encountered in the collection of the Australian Museum. She values the shell hook as ‘tangible evidence’ of the deep history of Aboriginal people in the region of Sydney harbour. In an online video introducing bara, Watson mobilizes the language of deep history to explain her design process: ‘I want to . . . delve deep into the subconscious of Country, what was here and what is still here, so that people who are visitors . . . or are living here understand those deep histories within this area’ (Watson, 2022). By designing the monument in the form of a shell hook, she activates the museum’s archive in cultural memory, bringing ‘those histories from the ground . . . up to the viewer’. When imagination is anchored in material evidence it is given ‘referential moorings’ within lived experience (Keightley and Pickering, 2012). The remediation of tangible evidence in the cultural form of a monument helps to create the ‘sense of living connection’ (Hirsch, 2008: 104) to an unexperienced past. Memories of that deep past circulate in contemporary cultural memory not only through the monument but through the thousands of photographs and videos that have already been and will continue to be made of people interacting with it. In an era of falling monuments, Wiradjuri/Yuin woman Angeline Penrith explains the significance of bara in decolonizing the nation’s memory: ‘Sydney has many public artworks that celebrate and recognise our nation’s colonial history . . . [but] very few works of significance that make visible and acknowledge the Eora custodians of this land’ (see Watson, 2022). Penrith values bara as a monument that ‘lets me . . . and . . . the wider community know that we’re still here’ – echoing Gaagadju man Bill Neidjie’s (1989: 69) claim that ‘this country [is] for us’. As these comments suggest, public artworks stimulate affective connectivity, and make political claims to sovereignty grounded in long habitation of and care for Country.
Watson’s vision is generous, inclusive and multidirectional. She values the crescent form of the shell hook as it also reflects ‘the shells of the Opera House and . . . the Sydney Harbour Bridge’. Thus, rather than envision bara as a muscular monument dominating the landscape, she describes it in playful but knowing terms, as ‘winking across at the Opera House, making those connections, so that when you are gathering in this space, you will feel those connections too’. The meaning of the wink – like the rock paintings and songcycles – is far from clear (Geertz, 1973). That imagined gesture of the bara ‘wink’ may indicate to settler colonial peoples that Aboriginal people know the land is ‘for us’ but acknowledge (and tolerate) the multiplicity and flow of footsteps, histories and icons that constitute Sydney in the colonial present. In imagining bara as ‘making connections’ between the deep past of Aboriginal people, their ongoing presence, and all those others present on Aboriginal land, the monument encodes a logic of ‘connectivity’ (Hirsch, 2012: 21). The wink extends an invitation to others, so that we (non-Indigenous peoples) begin to understand and recognize the deep history of Aboriginal peoples in this place. As such, Watson’s vision for bara works along both vertical and horizontal lines of transmission: she seeks to bring the Aboriginal deep past to the surface – a kind of vertical excavation – while she also seeks to make horizontal connections with other cultural traditions in the present.
That imagination that Watson’s bara encourages might be facilitated by another monument, different in character, just a short walk away around what is now called Sydney Cove. On a large screen, on the wall of a tunnel linking the underground exit from Wynyard train station to the Barangaroo precinct, one can watch an approximately 7-minute animated video titled Virtual Warrane @ Wynyard. Produced by Kooma artist Brett Leavy, this video is a ‘portal’ to a number of significant cultural places around the harbour ‘as they were prior to January 26, 1788’, the day the First Fleet of British officers and convicts arrived at the place known as Warrane in the Sydney Language (Leavy, 2019). The work depicts a day in the life of the Sydney people, beginning with an Elder watching sunrise over Warrane (the harbour) from the rocks of Tar-ra (Dawes Point), celebrating the land and seascape of Country, before a ‘ghost impression’ of the structures of the present day city appears in outline, orienting the viewer in relation to the landmarks reflected earlier in bara. The viewer then sees a camp awakening, as men rise in the morning sun and prepare to leave to hunt carrying galara fishing spears modelled on those held in the Australian Museum collection. They are, one reads, at Wynyard Park: the viewer realizes they are standing at an Aboriginal campsite.
From there, the men travel along a track that is now George Street to Tubowgule, where the Opera House now stands. The viewer then sees women foraging inland, carrying dilly bags again modelled on those held at the Australian Museum. And then we are shown women in their nowey’s (canoes) paddling out into the waters of Warrane to fish with lines and hooks, presumably bara. From there the scenes continue, culminating in a final night-time scene of ceremony, or Corroboree, at what is now the Royal Botanic Gardens. This work provides shape to Country with the intention of emplacing the viewer in it. It is designed as a ‘time machine’ that ‘transports the viewer to the pre-contact Gadigal landscape and way of life’ (Leavy, 2019). In doing so, it is less open than bara, providing images of what might otherwise be imagined more freely. But through a more literal animated visual medium it both stores and activates Gadigal memory – it ‘represents culture but also preserves culture’, in Leavy’s words – and so brings that imagination down to earth, as it were, anchoring it in place and providing further hints at how people and place shaped and were shaped by each other. In this sense, it is an Acknowledgement of Country that engages with and represents that Country.
In its relationships, Virtual Warrane @ Wynyard produces different mnemonic effects. It connects with other sites close by around the city: the Australian Museum, for instance, from whose collections Leavy drew design inspiration; the archaeological dig at Wynyard carried out in preparation for the building of the tunnel, which uncovered the tools that indicated the existence of the camp there; and bara, which turns the hooks we see in passing in Virtual Warrane into a monument. In Rigney’s terms, it ‘remediates’ these other objects of material culture and places them in new contexts, ‘creating fresh effects of immediacy’ and the possibility of new stories (Rigney, 2015: 69). To return to bara after witnessing this video is to imagine the bara in use, cast by a Gadigal woman into the waters of Warrane, imagining the city in a world otherwise. And in the immediate context of the screen on which it is displayed, Virtual Warrane is part of a longer set of videos describing the history of the site that runs on a loop every 20 minutes or so. As a collection, this brings together multiple times and temporalities; multiple memories. Placing these perhaps contradictory pasts in explicit relation reminds the viewer that they are standing above a train platform, on a Gadigal camp, and below a military barracks, linking them to pasts they have not themselves experienced but can imagine, ‘making present that which is absent’ (Pickering and Keightley, 2013: 122). And the common thread that runs through is articulated explicitly in the closing text-image of Virtual Warrane: ‘Always was/Always will be/Aboriginal land’. A temporality of enduring and un-ending continuity brings the deep past into the ‘now’ to constitute the deep present and invite the viewer to see themselves traversing the landscape in the footsteps of thousands of generations who have gone before.
In this way, both Virtual Warrane and bara tend to what Gesa Mackenthun and Christen Mucher (2021: 4) term ‘topological’ knowledge, to ‘place-based logics and poetics . . . that reach back to the times before colonialism but whose significance continues into the present’. These works activate place, that is, as itself a technology of memory, affirming continued connections between people and place in the present and in the time prior to the violence of settler colonialism. In so doing, they speak back to the settler colonial inscription of urban places with narratives of dispossession, fatal impact and the extinguishment of Indigenous entitlement by tides of History (Banivanua Mar, 2012: 176–7). They reveal Country.
Conclusion
These instances of public memory, which we have considered as examples of transmission that connect past and present, constitute what Barwick termed a ‘deep present’. This deep present, we think, might offer a site from which to approach the calls for decolonization we noted in the introduction. A project of decolonization ‘sets out to change the order of the world’; as an intellectual project it demands that we consider ‘different modes of possibility’ drawn from Indigenous worlds (Fanon, 2001 [1963]: 27; Simpson and Smith, 2014: 12). As a political project decolonization then requires us, Leanne Simpson (2011: 18) writes, ‘to reclaim the very best practices of our traditional cultures, knowledge systems and life-ways in the dynamic, fluid, compassionate, respectful context within which they were originally generated’. Beginning accounts of history or memory with the first violent encounters of colonial invasion reduces these possibilities; in Australia it circumscribes the possible stories that can be told from and about Country, obscuring the contexts in which First Law endures through connections across deep past and deep present representing decolonizing Indigenous futurities (RiverofLife et al., 2020: 546–7).
Rethinking decolonization in the context of deep time also helps us reconsider the ways we speak of the Anthropocene as a frame for work that engages with changing environments and the places of the human as an agent of that change. Anthropocene thinking supposes the human in a particular relation with the ‘natural’ world, as geological agents whose agency is recognizable on a geological scale through transformative marks left on the earth. In the Anthropocene it is ‘we who decide what nature is and what it will be’ (Crutzen and Schwägerl, 2011). We want here to point to two concerns with this way of framing the Anthropocene that emerge from the above discussions of memory in the deep present. First, it deploys a historicity of ‘disjunction and rupture’ (Wright, 2020: 295) which hinges again on a relatively presentist frame that reproduces the traumatic events of colonization as breaking chains of transmission. Whether the Anthropocene begins with nuclear chain-reactions in the mid-twentieth century, with the Industrial revolution in the nineteenth century (Steffen et al., 2011: 842), or with the catastrophic consequences of the invasion and colonization of the Americas in the seventeenth century (Lewis and Maslin, 2015: 177), it centres colonization and colonial actors as its protagonists. Second, and relatedly, this way of thinking the Anthropocene rests upon a conception of the human as acting upon, marking, defining, and determining others. This presumption mirrors processes of settler colonialism by centring what Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015) analyses as whiteness as a possessive relation, establishing relations of ownership and extraction with the world around us. As some of the analysis we have shared above suggests, however, humans in Indigenous memory have long acted geologically, producing change in the earth in ways that are not determining but are instead the result of actions ‘rooted in reciprocal, ongoing, and dynamic relationships’ (Todd, 2014: 250–1). Here it is memory in the deep present that offers ‘ways of thinking’ (Birch, 2016: 205) that might reframe the Anthropocene concept for a decolonizing future.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: Ben Silverstein’s work on this article was supported by the ARC Laureate Programme Rediscovering the Deep Human Past (grant number FL170100121).
