06 | The World’s Oldest Library

[Music] Hi, I'm Avery's and I'm Claire Wright and we are historians. If this introduction sounds to you like a confession or an act of sharing our addictions, well you're right. We are here to tell you about our addiction to the archives. So welcome to our podcast archive fever, where each episode will be conducting intimate conversations with writers, artists, curators, fellow historians and other victims of the research bug. We're going to talk to these archive addicts about what kind of archives they use, how often they use them, when they got their first hit, and what is their funniest, saddest, most frustrating and most illuminating experience in the archives. And we'll be asking the question, what madness is this? Today on archive fever we are talking to Dr. Billy Griffiths. Billy is an historian and research fellow at the Alfred Deacon Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation and also an associate investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage. Billy is published in the fields of Indigenous history, political history, deep history and the history of science, especially archaeology and anthropology. His most recent book, which has been getting all sorts of love, including numerous award listings, is Deep Time Dreaming, Uncovering Ancient Australia, published by Black Ink in 2018. Billy, welcome to archive fever or archives anonymous as we like to think of it. Lovely to be here. Billy, we'll get back to Deep Time Dreaming shortly, but I'd like to start by asking you if you can remember how you first got the research bug. When were you first bitten? Well actually my first true archival experience was with my first book, which was about a political history. It was the intoxication of finding out that all these documents about high profile meetings between important people were being released. After 40 years they get released and these cascade of documents being released just as I was beginning research on a book about Australian's relationship with China. So I was caught up in this world of political intrigue that you could suddenly go into the national archives as it was then. You had to give all sorts of different documentation to show that you would be responsible with the material, then to find out what happened inside behind those closed doors. What happened that the journalists from 40 years ago were speculating about? And that was an exhilarating experience and it propelled me through my first book, which was the China breakthrough. But I also felt that was very much an archival experience anchored in documents of a certain type of power, certain type of history and I crave something more and something deeper. And that's where it led me to the research which ultimately became Deep Time Dreaming, which has a very different sense of what an archive is. So about that transition from being an historian to being an archaeologist, I saw that you once stated in an interview that what led you to make that leap, you put it this way, it was the thrill of chasing another kind of archive. So tell us what you meant by that and describe the thrill of the chase in the archive. It sounds almost erotic. Well I'm not sure about that. It's certainly, yeah, it's intoxicating. It's eluring. I suppose I had some big questions that I needed answers to. I'm not an archaeologist. I work with archaeologists and in archaeology but I'm very much a historian and documents my discipline, which is why I'm so aware of their limitations. And the questions I wanted to answer demanded an engagement with a new type of archive, an archive from outside my discipline. It required a view of the entire landscape as an archive, as a cultural place imprinted with story that could be investigated with different techniques. So I pursued these and one of the ways I pursued them was by adjoining my first archaeological excavation. Actually I joined as the camp cook because I was the historian, not the archaeologist. And I joined this dig in Western Arnhem Land. Back in 2012 we went out to this amazing site, this site called Majid Bebe, which is a beautiful decorated rock wall, leaning out from the Arnhem Land Discatement. I last remnant of the plateau before the landscape gives away to these wet scrubby plains. It was based in this site for seven weeks on that first-ealtrip, slowly excavating our way into the earth, it's slowly descending into the earth, trailing our way through time. So it was engagement with a very different type of archive. But it was also an eye-opening experience. I could see how this archive was being used by our hosts, the Mirat people, who were actively mobilizing the archaeological finds the deep-time story in their own campaigns against uranium mining on their land. So I saw this archive as this deep thing which took us far back in time, thousands of years into the past, but there was also pressing in on the present constantly, a living heritage, like all archives, it's a contested space. That's what's underpinned the second book, I suppose. I want to go to that book in a minute, but I'm really interested in some of the language you're using to describe the experience, the pressing in and being embedded. And it's a very physical language. I mean, you're describing a physical archive, but you're also describing a very physical experience. Can you tell me what archive fever feels like to you? And is it different in a documentary setting from a physical setting? That actual experience of the fever upon you? I had certainly a visceral feeling to be in a place and to be there with people who can reveal its secrets, who can unravel the histories that are imprinted within it. It transports you really, it's a transporting experience, but I also have that transportational experience with a documentary record. And that's the parallel journey I take in this book, which is looking not only at the deep past and these archaeological finds and techniques that help unravel it, but then also working with oral histories and then also working with personal papers of archaeologists to tell very intimate stories. That's where you see a really interesting difference in the archives. When you're looking at what was left over on a scholar's desk the day they died, swept up into a box. It is a powerful, intimate, emotional experience, you can't help but be affected by that. And as you work through their papers you come to understand their very personal details. What made them tick? How their days were structured and how their ideas formed. And that's an insight which is I think in some ways unique to the documentary record, to the paper, which is its own visual experience. Speaking of the structuring of days, I'm really curious about what an average day looks like on an archaeological dig. As someone who's only ever worked in kind of conventional paper archives, I just have no real sense of what it's like to be out there in the sun or other city of weather conditions, trying to kind of unlock the secrets of deep time from the earth. Is it boring or is there kind of a drama and glamour to it? I think there is a bit of both but there is definitely a mechanical aspect to it as well. It's a physical labour and a labour of love for most of the people who work on these sites. It's very much a team endeavor as well. It's all archaeology is done as a team. The days start early. The changes of course with different sites. So I was just working recently on an archaeological site and the top of the Great Barrier Reef on Luzard Island and was entirely dependent on the tides and when we could get the boat out to the site to excavate or to survey for stone arrangements. Dependent on the weather, dependent on how many hours of manual labour we could squeeze into a day. In Arnhemland it started early, the crack of dawn and we worked the whole day through to sunset and it was like that every day for weeks. There is a repetitive process really which can become part of your routine but it never stops being this incredibly exhilarating experience. I find exhilarating because you are uncovering with every scrape of the trail, you're scraping away especially at those lower levels. Sometimes a couple hundred years with every scrape of the trail what emerges is a history. An archaeological site is not a monument. It is a history that is recovered through sweat, science and imagination. I've never worked with a physical archive, never worked with trail only with pencil and pencil sharpener but I'm really interested in something that you've said about working with a physical archive. You said a document always has an intention embedded within it. Someone's written it wanting to convey a point. Something like an artifact or sediment doesn't tell lies, it doesn't have any intention. It holds a story within it which is bereft of intention and influence. So what that sounds like is you're saying that artifacts are more truthful than documents. Is that what you're saying? Or isn't it always what we make of what we find? Wherever we find it, the interpretation. Oh absolutely. All archaeology or history is [BLANK_AUDIO] to the methods and attitudes and approaches of those who investigate those archives, or in an archaeological sense, who create the archives and then seek to comprehend them. So it's forever bound to people. And yet also, you're dealing with something much rora. I think that's what I'm trying to convey, and it's not more truthful, but it's rora. It doesn't have that layer of intention. The archive hasn't been cultivated for future reading. You're not engaging with someone who's looking towards their legacy. You are instead engaging with randomness. The discard a little window on a landscape, as you're digging down, especially in excavation, as you're digging down into that place. You just see whatever happened in that tiny little square, whether it be one meter by one meter, four meters by four meters. You're only seeing what has come through there. And that leaves these huge empty spaces, these gaps in understanding and knowledge. But you're aware that you're only capturing the margins, the fragments, where I think you can be persuaded, especially when you're working in someone's personal archive, you're seeing a fuller picture, you're entering their mind. On that question of interpretation, one of the things I found most striking about your book, Deep Time Dreaming, was the real prominence given to science and scientists in dating all these archaeological artifacts discoveries that are coming up, which highlights the way in which archaeological research, the archaeological archive, is a real team effort and it's a mix of science and humanity. How does that influence the research project, that influence of science and the time-lords, as you describe them, who date the samples? Yes, and we've seen an interesting shift really in the past half century, where archaeology is a discipline that straddles the borders between the sciences and the humanities. As it has been exposed to this dazzling array of new techniques, these chemical techniques, ecological mathematical techniques, some of that ground has been seeded to the time-lords, to those who can use the latest science to unlock certain secrets or to insights. You see that in just in published papers, it goes from quite an essay format, familiar format, or archaeologists working from within-history departments to papers that are full of graphs, that are mostly graphs. There is a common pursuit in I.C. archaeology in history as mutually reinforcing disciplines, each enlarges each other. But they also need to work together because there is a common pursuit of the past, trying to understand what happened, and how is that relevant to today? How do you also balance that perspective from science and the humanities when you are also engaging with, as you said before in your Arnhem Land Research, Indigenous people who might have a whole other way of understanding the meaning, the interpretation of a rock formation, or something that you have dug in that four squares that you have? Is there a hierarchy of knowledge systems that come into it? Where do you sit geophyses against dreaming? It's a wonderful question. I think that hierarchy really changes over the course of the process of creating the archive. The science is so dominant, and you can see that in the way in which these dates that emerge from these sites then get pulled into land rights campaigns or used by Indigenous activists to be taken seriously, is if they need some new date to establish what they have always felt and always known that they've been here forever. So there is definitely a hierarchy in that sense, but I mean this transition because in the field, then this is, I'm not just speaking from my experience, I'm speaking from reading the work of archaeologists in Australia over the past few decades. The work is such an intensive cross-cultural endeavor. The first interpretations come from the Indigenous partners with whom archaeologists are working. What's this? How does this fit in? If there's something that emerges from the pit that can't be understood often, the archaeologist defers to the Indigenous interlocutor, a person who's working with them and can understand how this might fit into their current life, what that means moving backwards in the past. The ethnographic record, these are forever haunting archaeology in Australia. If they're ever guiding archaeology in Australia, they take preeminence at first, I would say. And then as the process continues and as you get further away from the pit into the articles, that knowledge is kind of subsumed, is lost, disguised even, and then it becomes the Western or the Oral of Worst. Is that changing at all? Like are there Aboriginal people coming into archaeologies of field and kind of embedding Aboriginal knowledge in archaeological practises? Absolutely. And archaeology today is a much more collaborative endeavor than it was 20 years ago. It is not just done in partnership with Indigenous custodians, but the questions the researcher gender is set often by those communities. They have questions they want to find out about the past and then are actively involved in every step of the process. Is there scope to bring in Aboriginal epistemologies more to archaeological research and writing? Absolutely. And I also think there's much further we can go in terms of bringing Indigenous epistemologies and archaeology together. And there is wonderful work that's happening not enough, and there are no Indigenous archaeologists currently employed in universities at the moment, although the field is full of them. So there's so much more that needs to happen on that front. I can just see the power of Indigenous knowledge and experience as the way to understand and shape both the material record and then bring that into understandings of oral histories. We have some really exciting work that's looking at oral histories and then the theological events that are preserved in historical memory of certain Indigenous or alterations. And that's a different type of archival, again. So while people have been in Australia, there have been these massive environmental changes. So 65,000 years in that time, the sea level has risen by not one or two metres, but by 125 metres. And these were transformations that were experienced and then preserved in historical memory. You've seen Junefield's form and volcanoes erupt, and again these can be pinned down to certain old traditions. The most often invoked example is where hills become islands, and their memories of being able to walk out to a place that you can no longer walk to. There's no debate about the integrity of these oral histories, but there is debate about what events are they observing, what events are they recording, and there you have some estimates saying that these are memories that have survived 15,000 years. Others say the water and the land is constantly in flux and certain areas might have been cut off or might have been easier to walk, according to the shifting of the June's below the sea or the sand bars, which then seal up a place. So Port Phillip Bay, for example. You once had the era of a Liberian coming out through the bay, when the bay was hunting ground through the heads and out onto the Bastion plane. And this was this recently as 10,000 years ago when you could walk from Tasmania through to Port Morseby. So do stories of the hunting planes that is now the bay, do they date from 10,000 years ago, 8,000 years ago, 7,000 years ago, or because the bay is so thin, what of a sand bar blocked that bay off, and you were able to walk out to bow and heads, which what a scene you might might have been able to do only a couple of thousand years ago. There's no doubting the integrity of the old tradition has this as a hunting plane, but there is also debates about the dates. So Billy, you've reflected on the racialized power dynamic inherent in the archive, or interpreting the archive. I don't want to put you on the spot as kind of the bloke in the room, but I'd like to explore what I sort of think of as the Indiana Jones effect. The notion that archaeologists are rugged, intrepid researchers whose tools are sweat and risk and a dashing hat, whereas historians are more often kind of a fate. They don't like to get their hands dirty, and there's quite a gendered aspect of that. Is there anything to my theory, this kind of muscular and quite masculine glamour of the archaeologists' work? It's interesting you say that, because of course there's Mekismo in that archaeology, it saturates parts of it, and the Indiana Jones effect was around long before Indiana Jones. Side note, Indiana Jones was a shocking archaeologist, alluded to the left right and center, but within archaeology there are different forms of archaeology, which are also become quite gendered, especially in Australia. There is the glamorous, the big dates, the hunt for the oldest sites, the coldest places, the hottest places. My dates bigger than your date. Exactly, my plusescent sequence is bigger than your plusescent sequence, very much dominated by the cowboys and cowgirls, but mainly the cowboys of the discipline. Another form of archaeology which has underpins our current heritage frameworks, but which has been championed mainly by female archaeologists, such as Ismaum Abraheid and Sylvia Hallum is the landscape approach, which doesn't hone in the most spectacular or the most dramatic aspect of a place, but regards an entire landscape as a document that can be read. in its entirety. So these require systematic slow, less glamorous, painstaking work to piece together the survey across vast areas looking for scarred trees and surface scatters, old ceremonial grounds and axe quarries, mascarcites and middens. Read those and piece them together into some kind of story about the whole region. What are the connections between these places? Not only how old are they but how do they interact with each other. And in your experience of working with the archaeological archive, do you have a preference for those two types of models? I'm much more excited about reading landscapes. I think there was this one moment of archival revelation, very different to that political revelation earlier. It was flying across to Ella Springs and then looking out the window, we were flying over the Simpson desert and saw these June fields, just June's corrugating the landscape and the archaeologist next to me pointed out the window and said, "See those June's. They're aligned with the dominant wind patterns in the last place or maximum 21,000 years ago. There is a record of dramatic environmental change that people witnessed, experienced and survived and thrived in. So even in these harsh arid zones, the desert is changing. There are people in the arid interior moving from water to well making a home and in many ways, the modern arid zone formed around people. They didn't move into the desert, the desert came to them. And I think that's a mind blowing insight that comes from both the oral counts but then also this way of reading the landscape." And has your experience of reading the landscape like that and kind of coming face-to-face with these this evidence of dramatic environmental change in the deep past? Has that informed your thinking about environmental change in the present and the future? Are there lessons here in Australia's deep past for thinking about climate change? Yeah, I think so. There's enormous lessons to be learned from engaging with Indigenous knowledge systems, connections to country, future change to sea levels. How did people respond in the past? What can we learn from that? Probably the biggest example that comes to mind is the ways in which the continent or the countries, many many countries within the continent have been managed by fire sticks, by digging sticks and the ways in which Indigenous peoples have learnt to manage that landscape. One of the great challenges we face in Australia in terms of climate change is is increasing exposure to fire and big fires, firestorms. We can learn from the ways in which Indigenous peoples have managed vegetation, lived with fire, form a linear and used it for their own means. That can inform the way we manage our landscapes today, our vegetation, our forest, our bush, land today and minimise these massive fires. But also, again, this comes to a more profound point, which is to have a shift in perspective, to not see ourselves as outside our environment, but as an intimate part of it. I think that's the key insight that will help us deal with the crises of climate change. Billy, one of the themes that has come up over and over in our discussions for archive fever is an idea of the ethics of the archive. It seems to me that a large part of the story that deep-time dreaming tells is about Aboriginal communities' attempts to take control over their cultural information and access to their land, which are often one and the same thing. So should the physical archive be open and accessible to anyone just as theoretically anyone could go into the National Archives of Australia or the State Library and start digging through the files? Can anybody just go and start digging on country? Well, absolutely not. I say that so forcefully now and that's a revelation that's come about in the past half century when you look back in the 60s, 50s, archaeologists went about their work without consulting Indigenous peoples for the most part or seeking them out even to. So the archive was just there for the taking? It was there for the taking and it is there for the taking in other countries but in Australia you can't work that way anymore and that is the legacy of this incredible groundswell of Indigenous activism, these powerful leaders who have stood up for their heritage and urged for a chance to have a voice in the decision making about their land and their heritage. Yeah, in the book I really try and tell a story of some of these wonderful people who have set archaeological agendas and also shaped the way that heritage is practiced in Australia such as Alice Kelly and Frank Ammanumana, Rosalind Langford. They're speaking on behalf of many others as well who have fought to ensure that there is a degree of respect and understanding that you can't just blindly walk across a landscape and enter it, uncover it's secrets. We've been not invited to it, we know are allowed there, and if you look back at the comparison I made at the beginning with this national archives of Australia which has these strict rules and who can come in and you've got this 40-year window about when you can look at certain files, they're just as strict rules about control of knowledge, in fact far stricter rules, far more intricate rules about who can know certain things in Indigenous societies. So can we really see those Indigenous leaders and activists as archivists? The Indigenous novelist Alexis Wright describes the land, seas and sky and atmosphere Australia as the world's oldest library under the custodianship of ancestors. I think that's a beautiful thought and then it really conveys so much archivists, perhaps, I mean I'd hesitate to extend the archive, again this Western concept too far, there are strong feelings about archives and they're not neutral spaces, they are contested spaces, but to the degree that the power lies in their hands, yes. Billy it's great to think of the archive as a contested space, not a neutral space. Will you also know that it can be a very strange space? So I'm going to ask you in our sort of summing up, can you tell us what is the weirdest or most memorable thing that you've encountered in the archive, either as an historian or as an archaeologist? Strangely enough something comes immediately to mind, it is not in Australia, it's in Cambridge, a very eminent archaeologist whose papers are consulted, he had a habit of writing his own obituary every few months. Every few months. This is how I shall be remembered and any wrote in third person that I was glorious and yada yada yada, it was such revealing insight into the man and then that comes back to this broader question about truthfulness of archives, there he is speaking to me, he is addressing his legacy, he's thinking about how he's going to be remembered, it matters a lot. And did any of those obitures get used? I think a version of one of them was sent to his close colleague, so maybe. Well it strikes me that that's kind of like us curating our own social media presence, maybe that's just what that fellow was doing but in a slightly more morbid way. Maybe, yeah. And another question, believe that we've been asking all our guests, do you have a dirty little archive secret? I don't have a story to share with my own, but there is, it comes to mind, this box, actually a series of boxes that Lake Mungo full of artefacts, stone tools that tourists have picked up over the years from the archive of the of the Lakeshore, and then when they get home they get spooked about what they might have brought upon them so they pop it in the mail back to Lake Mungo and of course once it goes back there it's lost its context. A conscience box. Yeah, a conscience box. Well thank you so much Billy for coming in and joining us in the archive box here today and if you'd like to learn more about Billy's work you can follow him on Twitter @billy_griffiths. So until next time, I'm Avery's and I'm Claire Wright. And you've been listening to archive fever, a Latrobe University podcast recorded and produced by Matt Smith on Warundry land. Warundry sovereignty was never seeded and we pay our respects to their elders past present and emerging. You can subscribe to this podcast on Apple podcasts or wherever you choose to listen. Our theme music is by pottington bear and you can hear more at soundofpitchard.com. You can follow Eve on Twitter @eavrease and you can follow Claire on Twitter @clairaright or on Instagram @clairrighthistorian. Coming up on the next episode, there were thousands of responses, mainly print out some emails. I had to stop reading them, the level of misogyny and ageism and it was just like I'll far out, you know, I thought I probably don't need to read every single word here. I mentioned that to Jermaine Greer and she said, "Well you did more than me because I didn't read them."