Ann McGrath

Ann McGrath is Professor of History and Director of the Australian Centre for Indigenous History at The Australian National University. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and was awarded an Order of Australia Medal for services to history, especially Indigenous history. She has published widely on the history of gender and colonialism in Australia and North America. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate at Linneaus University in Sweden, has advised various government enquiries and produced two documentary films, Frontier Conversation (2006) and Message from Mungo (2014). Her publications include Born in the Cattle: Aborigines in Cattle Country (1987) and Contested Ground: Aborigines under the British Crown (1994). She wrote, with Ann Curthoys, How to Write History that People Want to Read (2011). She was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 2013–14, and was awarded a Bellagio Residency for 2014. She serves on the board of the journal Aboriginal History.

http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1353-4653

Long History, Deep Time »

Deepening Histories of Place

Edited by: Ann McGrath, Mary Anne Jebb

The vast shape-shifting continent of Australia enables us to take a long view of history. We consider ways to cross the great divide between the deep past and the present. Australia’s human past is not a short past, so we need to enlarge the scale and scope of history beyond 1788. In ways not so distant, these deeper times happened in the same places where we walk today. Yet, they were not the same places, having different surfaces, ecologies and peoples. Contributors to this volume show how the earth and its past peoples can wake us up to a sense of place as history – as a site of both change and continuity. This book ignites the possibilities of what the spaces and expanses of history might be. Its authors reflect upon the need for appropriate, feasible timescales for history, pointing out some of the obstacles encountered in earlier efforts to slice human time into thematic categories. Time and history are considered from the perspective of physics, archaeology, literature, western and Indigenous philosophy. Ultimately, this collection argues for imaginative new approaches to collaborative histories of deep time that are better suited to the challenges of the Anthropocene. Contributors to this volume, including many leading figures in their respective disciplines, consider history’s temporality, and ask how history might expand to accommodate a chronology of deep time. Long histories that incorporate humanities, science and Indigenous knowledge may produce deeper meanings of the worlds in which we live.

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