ancient history
Mike Smith
Josephine Flood
The Riches of Auncient Australia: An Indispensable Guide For Exploring Prehistoric Australia
UQP $39.95pb, 382pp
0 7022 3083 9
LAST YEAR I TOOK my 12-year-old daughter to see Lake Mungo. We
talked all morning about ancient lakes and Aboriginal camp sites
but looking at the saltbush she could not make the jump.
Standing on the lunette, her keen eyes picked out a tiny
crenulated piece of bone amongst the drift sand. Less than ten
millimetres long it was a fish otolith, part of the bony
structure of the inner ear, its shape characteristic of golden
perch. Puzzled she looked around at the dry plain and started
to ask 'How did a fish get way out here?'. Watching her eyes I
saw the flash of understanding: an ancient lake full of water
snapped into focus. The tiny otolith was tangible evidence of
past environments no book could match. But to grasp the past
imaginatively and intellectually you need to visit the sites and
learn to read the landscapes. This is part of the reason I like
the latest edition of The Riches of Ancient Australia, Josephine
Flood's field guide to prehistoric Australia. It encourages people to get out and look around.
Flood draws on the Register of the National Estate to compile a visitor's guide to archaeological sites throughout Australia. The strongest feature of the book is its continent-wide coverage with information on more than 200 places ranging from shell middens and rock art sites to fish traps, wells, caves and rock shelters. Think of it as a sort of Lonely Planet guide to prehistoric Australia but do not expect an encyclopaedia or gazetteer of sites. Flood chose to exclude historical sites. This is a pity because her inclusion of geological or fossil sites (eg. dinosaur tracks at Lark quarry QLD; Wolfe Creek meteorite crater WA) and frequent use of arcane technical language ('hominids', 'occupation deposit', 'Pleistocene') make the book seem more about a primordial past than about Aboriginal history. A scattering of Aboriginal myths and traditions through the text does little to relieve this. And yet the majority of the archaeological sites in the book relate to the last few hundred years, providing a richly detailed chronicle of Aboriginal history and changes in Aboriginal society since about 1500 AD.
There are some surprising omissions and occasional factual errors. Some major sites, mentioned in the text, lack a site entry: the well-known rock engravings at Panaramitee and Karolta, and the Cuddies Springs site where the bones of extinct giant marsupials intermingle with the remains of Aboriginal camp debris are not listed. It was news to me that I had re-excavated Malangangerr and I was dismayed to see the popular misconception, that central Australia had 'freshwater lakes teeming with fish and other creatures' during the last ice-age, recycled yet again. The Riches of Ancient Australia is primarily a visitor guide written to fill growing interest in cultural tourism in this area. It does this very well but rely on it as a reference work with caution.
Guides to archaeological sites are written to a well-tried formula: a potted history, followed by a summary of the types of sites one can expect to see, followed by a brief listing of sites in each region together with some perfunctory details on access. Visiting Britain in the mid 1980s I picked up the current Collins field guide only to find a quaintly archaic text that seemed trapped in the 1930s. In contrast The Riches of Ancient Australia has been regularly up dated. Flood and UQP are to be commended for this.