Culture And Country - What Happens Next? podcast on exploring our history

Susan Carland:

Welcome to another episode of What Happens Next? I'm Dr. Susan Carland. Indigenous communities have deep connections to their physical and environmental history and have been studying and preserving it for tens of thousands of years. Many are now generously sharing their knowledge and understanding that's passed down from generation to generation with non-Indigenous archaeologists, anthropologists, and palaeontologists, helping us all to better understand our country, community, culture, and history. Dr. Chris Urwin is a Research Fellow at Monash Indigenous Studies Centre. He's also off to work for the Smithsonian Institute in the US next year. No biggie. Working with local communities and experts in oral tradition in Papua New Guinea, Chris discovered that Western archaeological methods weren't necessarily covering new ground. Let's hear from Chris.

Chris Urwin:

Hi, I'm Chris Urwin. I'm a Research Fellow at Monash Indigenous Studies Centre, and I work in partnership with Indigenous communities to investigate their remarkable landscapes in Australia and Papua New Guinea.

Susan Carland:

Dr. Chris Urwin, welcome.

Chris Urwin:

Thanks for having me on the podcast, Susan.

Susan Carland:

What do you think is wrong with some of the ways we explore our history?

Chris Urwin:

Yeah, I think the way, potentially, some of the ways in which we explore our history in Australia can be very confusing, obviously, because it's a colonial settler nation in which you have First Nations, so Indigenous communities who are essentially advocating for their own heritage to be controlled by them and explored by them, I think. So, that can be a tension, but I think that's something that is gradually in sort of universities and museums is moving now towards Indigenous control of those sort of aspects of exploration.

Susan Carland:

You work with Indigenous people on archaeology, and you've had some unexpected insights. Tell us about what you've learned through your research.

Chris Urwin:

Yeah. So, in early 2015, I started my PhD in archaeological research on the south coast of Papua New Guinea in a place called Orokolo Bay and sort of arrived there with colleagues from the PNG National Museum and Art Gallery who regulate cultural heritage work in that region. And we arrived, did the kind of typical archaeological things, sort of set up a research partnership with the local village communities, very keen to be on board with that research, and then we headed off and did some sort of initial surveys and with a view to doing excavations. But I think during that process, it really struck me that people already had this intimate knowledge, not only of what was kind of sitting on the surface, like cultural materials, things that their ancestors left behind but also what was underneath the ground, in the subsurface, which I guess in sort of Western academia, maybe we tend to think of as being the domain of archaeology.

Susan Carland:

And how had they come across it, just by digging?

Chris Urwin:

Yeah, that's right. So, by digging in kind of smallholder agriculture, which is in the Pacific known as gardening, and so digging beneath the surface every day, just this kind of almost habitual process of digging beneath the surface. And in that process, they're coming across heaps of earthenware pottery shards, and also these distinctive thin lines of black sand beneath the surface. They have these kinds of interpretations of those different things. So, the pottery is like it reminds them, firstly, of where their villages were and where their ancestors were cooking and settling, but also of this trade that went on with people from 400 kilometres to the east, maritime people who would sail in year on year for the past several centuries and forge these kinds of long-term relationships with people. And then the black sand had a more kind of cosmological significance. It's like from the time the very earth was being made and that kind of local landscape for people.

Susan Carland:

So, you went in as a PhD student thinking, "We're going to work together, and we'll dig together, and we'll uncover these things together." And then you get there and they're like, "Oh no, we actually, we've done all that. We've been doing this for a long time. Why don't we tell you what's going on here?"

Chris Urwin:

Absolutely. It was an amazing experience in, and kind of masterclass in, listening, I think. In research and in archaeological research with Indigenous communities, that is absolutely crucial. And so then you can build an amazing project together where you go, "Okay, well, what are some of the things we don't know, and what are some of the things that you'd like to find out that are kind of side stories there?" which sit kind of nicely alongside the oral traditions.

Susan Carland:

And how's it changed the way you approach research now?

Chris Urwin:

Yeah, well, as I said before, I guess it was this amazing masterclass in listening, sort of having the humility to sit and go, "Well, I'm actually not the expert here. I have some technical expertise that's going to contribute some new angles to the story potentially," but always approaching that kind of research as a partnership where you're learning from each other.

Susan Carland:

What do you think is the most important thing you learned? You said you've learned the important role of listening, but what else do you think you've learned?

Chris Urwin:

Yeah, so I think I've learned that in archaeology, we can kind of come at it from an approach of like, "Here's the Western archaeological knowledge and we work with the subsurface, and this is kind of what we'll contribute to a project." But then actually, Indigenous people on this project were saying, "Well, we already have significant knowledge of the subsurface." And I think for me, that kind of highlighted that we have these kind of parallel, almost kind of scientific knowledges within different societies, and there's a lot for those different societies to learn from one another.

Susan Carland:

You talk to us about the process of how you would approach your research in partnership with local Indigenous communities and First Nations people. What is the actual thing you research? You're looking into the deep history of Indigenous people. How far back do you go?

Chris Urwin:

Yeah, so it depends, I guess, on the research questions. And as you're sitting down in those initial meetings to establish the partnership, that would be the kind of questions you're saying, "Well, what is it that you'd like to find out about your own heritage and history?" And so, it's going to vary in different kinds of contexts. On the south coast of PNG, you've got these kind of, sort of 3,000-year-old sand ridges on which people have been living for about that time. So, that's going to be probably about as far back as you're going to track the histories. But then, people in that region of the world, they're fascinated in trying to apply the carbon dating to see how that sits alongside the genealogical reckonings of because their ancestors moved from place to place to place. And so we would sort of go to each of these places, and sit there, and tell stories, and talk about what that place was like, and then they would go, "Well, why don't we do a dig here and find out because we've heard the stories of there being an ancestral house here. So, let's actually find that out."

Susan Carland:

And would you find those things?

Chris Urwin:

Yeah, that's right. I mean, strikingly, these sites fit very closely with these genealogical reckonings. We'd be excavating a 400-year-old kind of ancestral house site, and sure enough, beneath the surface, you're finding the traces of those postholes beneath the ground, which is a pretty exciting moment for all of us as we're kind of digging that together. Yeah.

Susan Carland:

And I imagine, perhaps for the local people, it was a welcome discovery, but perhaps not so much of a surprise as it would be to, say, to us because we're not a people that have a strong oral tradition. We don't memorise stories and pass them down. And I wonder if people, the average Australian, would think, "Well, how reliable are these stories? Is it a bit sort of just passing along whispers and things get lost?" Whereas for communities that do have strong oral historical traditions, there's an absolute confidence in the tightness of protecting the information. Were you surprised at how accurate they were?

Chris Urwin:

Yeah, that's a good question. I don't think I was overly surprised. I mean, there's been other research in the Pacific, I suppose, that has shown broadly the same thing in terms of that sort of people have an amazing genealogical reckoning of these places. But I think what was amazing to me was this revelation also that almost people's local form of archaeology plays into how the oral traditions are maintained and revivified. It's like an amazing process as they're digging in these places every day, it plays a role in how they're remembering these places.

Susan Carland:

Do you get a sense of the kinds of people or the kinds of communities that lived? When you do your excavation work or your digging, do you get a sense of who they were?

Chris Urwin:

Yeah, I think through the stories, these places are kind of enlivened as we're kind of sitting there talking with elders about the histories that connect those places. That's an amazing kind of... These archaeological sites, as we're digging them, are almost like theatres where people are there and kind of engaging with the stuff as it's coming out of the ground and telling stories. So, that really does revivify, I think, the past, in that sense.

Susan Carland:

Based on all the research you've done of communities of people that, as you said, 3,000 years, however many thousands of years, what have you learned about what it means to be human?

Chris Urwin:

I think maybe, and I'm sure this shows my bias as a researcher, but I think that people are inherently social and that the drivings, the reasons why people settle in places, the reasons why they establish these long-term social relationships with people 400 kilometres away by sea, these are no simple undertakings, but it's like people are driven by conducting ceremonies with other people, and by just the friendships that come along with these kinds of things.

Susan Carland:

Which, when you think about what we've been through with the pandemic, has sort of put that into a sharp relief.

Chris Urwin:

Yeah, it really does, doesn't it? It's sort of the drive for person to person connection is huge and is very detrimental to people's wellbeing when it's not there.

Susan Carland:

It seems like it's innate.

Chris Urwin:

Yeah, absolutely.

Susan Carland:

Why are you so passionate about what you do?

Chris Urwin:

I think I'm passionate about what I do because, I mean, it's just striking. Like, I think when working, having the privilege of working with Indigenous people on their heritage sites, when they're kind of devising a project, when we're working in partnership, you just can't help but be struck by, I suppose, the presence of their ancestral landscapes. Archaeology does have that excitement of discovery, discovering together, literally unravelling and uncovering the past.

Susan Carland:

You talked about how on your PhD, you sort of had this realisation of a need to change the way you thought about research. If you hadn't changed, or if we, as researchers, hadn't changed in that direction, what could have been lost?

Chris Urwin:

Yeah, I think so much could have been lost. I think, obviously, within archaeology and so many disciplines have gone through, primarily because of Indigenous activism in this space, have gone through a real reckoning and a process of going, "Well, actually, the control needs to be seated within these communities. And they're the hosts, and if they're inviting Indigenous or non-Indigenous researchers to work with them, that's their prerogative." And I think we've gained an amazing amount from that. I mean, the example I can think of is the Gunditjmara's World Heritage bid over in Western Victoria, and that's an example of an Indigenous-led project right from start to finish. They talk about it being like a two-decade journey from first thinking about that, and then inviting sort of Monash Uni archaeologist, Ian McNiven, to work with them a bit on the antiquity of the eel traps that they have over that side of Victoria, and then all the way to actually taking that bid to UNESCO and being successful. I think that's such a rich story and a place that so many Australians are going to be enriched by visiting and hearing those stories. So, we would have lost that if all of the knowledge had been seated with these kind of Western academics kind of thing.

Susan Carland:

Dr. Chris Urwin, thank you so much for joining us.

Chris Urwin:

Thanks so much, Susan.

Susan Carland:

Professor Lynette Russell is the director of the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre. Lynette explains how First Nations cultures preserve and study history differently and what we can all learn from their methods and approaches. Here's Lynette.

Lynette Russell:

Hi, my name is Lynette Russell. I am a Laureate professor in the Faculty of Arts in Monash Indigenous Studies Centre. I'm an interdisciplinary historian. So, I do anthropological history, which is really a history that tries to, not only teach us about the past or learn about the past but also understand what people were doing, what their motivations were. And I work closely with archaeologists and other disciplinary specialists. I'm also the deputy director of the Centre of Excellence in Biodiversity and Heritage.

Susan Carland:

Professor Lynette Russell, welcome.

Lynette Russell:

Thank you.

Susan Carland:

You're a historian, but you also work closely at the interface of science. Why do you think it's important that those two disciplines talk to each other in their research?

Lynette Russell:

I've been long concerned about the level of science literacy in our communities that I think a lot of people don't know a lot about science, and I think the best communicators are actually humanity scholars. So, sometimes it takes a humanity scholar to, I guess, translate some of those science concepts, particularly around things like ancient, great, huge time depths, such as 65,000 years of Australian occupation. So, things like that, it's always been really important to me because I am a historian and I am good at telling stories and telling tales, which is what we do, that it's an opportunity for us to work closely together. And I'm very fortunate in that I'm the deputy director of the Centre of Excellence in Biodiversity and Heritage. Our primary aim is to merge what we call the humanities and social sciences with the science, technology, engineering, maths.

Susan Carland:

What do you think we can learn about ourselves, what it means to be human, based on the research that you do, that deep research, that deep-time research into early human civilisations?

Lynette Russell:

Well, we are probably the only species on the planet that worries about our past, that thinks about it, that is really engaged with it. Not only do we think about our past, we think about our future. So, we're both planning forward and looking back at the same time. To me, it's vitally important that we understand as much as we possibly can about the past. The past, it is a foreign country, as they say, but it's also filled with mysteries, and wonders, and extraordinary human endeavour, and wonderful stories. So, that's why I think it's a really exciting thing to do. What would we lose if we didn't do it? We would probably lose the capacity to tell those stories, and I can't imagine anything that would be worse.

Susan Carland:

You do a lot of research with Indigenous communities. What are some of the ways that they record or preserve their histories that we should be learning more from?

Lynette Russell:

Well, the best example of that is around climate. Aboriginal communities, in particular, have long traditions of telling stories about climate change, and they've built into those stories ways to accommodate the climate. So, where we might think we have to have everything written down in a book and we need science to test it, they can tell us stories that are many thousands of years old, stories that have been handed down and given primacy because they're so important, stories of things like the sea level rising, or times of seasonal changes, or certain animal used to be here that is no longer here. All of these things are inscribed both on the landscape and into the stories that people tell.

Susan Carland:

Is it hard to convince a non-Indigenous audience about the accuracy of oral traditions? Because we are not, now certainly, we're not a tradition that memorises things. So, I wonder if it's hard for non-Indigenous people or people who don't come from primarily oral traditions who are phenomenal at just memorising huge amounts of information or stories or details. How do you convince people that this is, in fact, as accurate as what you would find in an old book written down?

Lynette Russell:

I think because it's, the history is embedded in the landscape and people can tell you. They will observe a phenomenon, say a rock, or a tributary, or a river, or a tree, or something that they have been told about. So, from generations and generations and generations, that then comes to stand for the story, stand for the knowledge. I think people are getting more inclined to listen. I think the non-Indigenous community is getting more inclined to listen. I think there's been a tremendous shift and we know there's lots of criticisms associated with people like, say, Bruce Pascoe doing his amazing work, thinking this stuff through. But I think the... Well, I would suggest that the number of books he sold would indicate that lots of people are at least interested. And I think that there is a shift, a real shift, and people are now listening and starting to take these things at not necessarily face value, but at a deeper value.

Susan Carland:

Could part of that be because we are finally crashing into the limits of Western understanding of things? For so long, there was this idea that Western understanding were the primacy and the ultimate, and now we're starting to face things which -  our way of doing things, it's exacerbating the problem as opposed to fixing it. So, we had to sort of hit that hard place before we were willing to go, "Maybe, actually, we do need to listen to other people as well."

Lynette Russell:

I think there's an element of that, definitely. I think society is starting to shift and think that, "Well, we need to be, if these people have lived sustainably in a place for 65,000 years, maybe we should listen." And I think of something like the tsunami, the Boxing Day Tsunami, which was absolutely devastating and horrific. But if you travel through those places now, you wouldn't know it had happened because their resilience and their capacity to respond and their flexibility is just built into their societies. The places that haven't responded so well are the ones that are sort of solid and entrenched and unable to move quickly and flexibly. So, to me, that's the major reason why we should listen. And also just take this recent pandemic. 2020's been a most bizarre year, obviously. But if you were to take the statistics of the number of Aboriginal people in Australia, and should they have had the pandemic at the same levels as the rest of the country, we would have anticipated significant numbers of deaths and certainly significant numbers of hospitalisations, and we haven't seen that. Because Aboriginal communities knew exactly what to do, particularly those in the rural and the remote regions of Australia. They shut down quickly. They closed their borders and they said, "Nobody in, nobody out. We've got this under control." We need to listen to those sorts of people because they're very wise. There's an enormous wisdom there.

Susan Carland:

Tell us about some of the research you're doing at the moment that makes you really excited.

Lynette Russell:

Sure. I'm absolutely thrilled to be starting the Global Encounters Programme. It's a five-year fellowship programme that's looking at encounters with Indigenous Australians coming from the sea in the last thousand years. So, we're looking at the Makassans who were trepang fishers in Northern Australia. We're looking at potential Polynesian visits along the east coast. We've got the Dutch, the Spanish, the French, and the Portuguese. And we have an extraordinary opportunity to delve in and look at all these amazing records. And we're doing not just archival records. We're doing other really interesting things, like we're looking at the different vegetations. So, what sort of plants did these people bring with them? For example, right across the top of Australia, you find tamarind trees, and tamarind trees are not native to our country. So, they were brought here. So, we're trying to track things like the arrival of the tamarind tree.

Susan Carland:

And I wonder how many of our listeners would be surprised to know just how many people did arrive here before British or European settlers did.

Lynette Russell:

Oh, and there's hundreds and hundreds of encounter stories, hundreds of them. And there's also the trepang industry, which really, over the last sort of 400 years... I mean, it's probably started a little before that. But by the time, certainly, by the time Matthew Flinders is going around Australia, he encounters 15, 1,600 Indonesian, Makassan Indonesian Muslim men. And, of course, they also introduce Islam to Australia hundreds of years ago, which is very unusual. And people don't expect this. I'm going to venture that in the next few years, we will stop being surprised by these stories because they are something that we all need to know.

Susan Carland:

Yeah. They're our history.

Lynette Russell:

Absolutely.

Susan Carland:

So, you mentioned that you're looking at plants that were brought into Australia, like the tamarind. Will there be any way to assess maybe plants or seeds that were taken from Australia?

Lynette Russell:

We certainly hope to. We certainly hope to, to see whether or not there are similar sort of reciprocal arrangements of people taking things back. One of the things that people often think of when they think of Australia and contact, it's always people coming. No one's ever going. And yet, we know for a fact that Aboriginal people certainly hopped on those prows and sailed back. And some of them even ended up living in Indonesia and maintaining families, and all the rest. So, there's a whole range of reasons that looking at this stuff is really exciting. And it says Australia was not an isolated place. There's this impression that it was a... To use the famous quote from the 1920s "an unchanging environment, unchanging people." This is not what this was. This was a place of extraordinary activity. Around the coast, people were coming and going.

Susan Carland:

It is a remarkable history. Will you be investigating it, I'm imagining through oral stories? What else will you be using? Will there be palaeontology to look at seeds? What is the suite of resources you use?

Lynette Russell:

I've got a botanist who's looking at all the botanical evidence that we can find at the moment. Archaeological evidence is absolutely crucial, particularly for that Northern Australia where we don't necessarily have written records.

Susan Carland:

So what does that include, that archaeological evidence?

Lynette Russell:

Excavation of Makassan sites, which might be sites that have had trepang processed in them, habitation sites, living sites. And then there's all sorts of very peculiar things like African coins that turn up in the islands in the far north of Australia. We don't know how they got there. If it was just one, you might say, "Well, it was dropped," but then another few came out a couple of years ago. So, there seems to be something happening there.

Susan Carland:

Wow.

Lynette Russell:

Now, they could well have been traded across, through Malay into Indonesia, and then back down into Northern Australia. We have Chinese ceramics, all sorts of unusual Chinese ceramics. Ian McNiven, one of our colleagues here at Monash University, has for the oldest date for Chinese ceramics, a very small piece of tradeware, which dates 8-900 years ago. So, this could well be the start of these early trades and that's in Torres Strait.

Susan Carland:

Wow. That is remarkable. It astounds me that we don't know about this, that we don't talk about this. In so much of the public Australian imagination, everything still began 200 years ago.

Lynette Russell:

Absolutely. In fact, one of my real passions is, certainly out of this project, is that we will change the history books, but we will change the history books that are used to teach kids.

Lynette Russell:

When I went to school, the first chapter was this skinny, little three, four pages on Aboriginal people, which was rather pitiful, and that people were pitiful in the way that they were depicted. And then we got to the good bit and the good bit was 1770. That was it. There was nothing before 1770. And if you think we're talking about 65,000 years of occupation, and then suddenly everything starts in 1770, I think the unnecessary emphasis that we've put on the British has actually skewed our history. I think in a way, we need to reclaim some of that. So, consequently, I'm thinking, "Well, let's look at the last 600 years, the last thousand years, all those other people coming here."

Susan Carland:

Really changing our timeframe. I guess if you think of the way we conceptualise time in a Western context, it's BC, AD. And we've always sort of had in Australia, our BC, AD point was 1788. And you're actually totally breaking that apart and saying, "This is not our turning point."

Lynette Russell:

No. My argument would be that in fact, 1788, while it's certainly the most dramatic, it certainly has the most impact, and it certainly, for our Aboriginal people, for us, it has the most dire outcomes. But the reality is if we go back, people have come and visited our country, our continent for millennia. And that in itself says that the British are just the last of a long line of people who have come here, visited. They just happened to come here, visit, and stay.

Susan Carland:

How could that change the way we see ourselves when so much of Australian conceptualisation is tied up in the arrival of the British and conflict with Indigenous people? But if we can totally reframe our sense of self to be one that was obviously starting 65,000 years ago, with Aboriginal people and a very flourishing, welcoming exchange of different cultures of ideas from people before white people, how could that change how we see ourselves as a nation?

Lynette Russell:

I think the crucial thing for me is that we, as this project is multidisciplinary, as I mentioned to you, it's also multi-lingual. So, we're dipping into texts that are not in English and that's crucially important. We have this perception in Australia that our history is British history because it's written in English and it's also, there's that focus on Cook. This is the 250th year. I mean, I feel kind of glad that 2020 happened. We at least knocked the wind out of Cook's sails. But certainly, I think it's going to make a really big difference if we start to think that Aboriginal people were encountering the Dutch and learning Dutch, not English.

Susan Carland:

Right. Right. And encountering Makassans and learning different religions.

Lynette Russell:

That's exactly right.

Susan Carland:

Lynette Russell, this has been so interesting. Thank you so much for your time.

Lynette Russell:

Pleasure.

Susan Carland:

That's all for this episode. We'll be back next time on What Happens Next?with practical tips, advice, and resources from our experts. I'll see you then.