What is deep history and “everywhen”? In recent years, historians in Australia have called for the discipline to move beyond its delimited temporal scale with its research focus on a few decades or centuries. For most of the twentieth century, the way national histories were taught in schools was as if nothing much happened until Europeans arrived. Indigenous people were portrayed as having lived in a timeless land and were assumed to be a people without history. In such settler-colonizer nations, European invasion of Indigenous domains marks the beginning of these national histories. And yet, Aboriginal Australians have been living in the land Downunder for as long as 65,000 years. How do we access that deep past?
The term “Everywhen” was coined by anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner in 1956 from his fieldwork among the Murinbata people of Australia’s Northern Territory. The term described the time of the “Dreaming”—a term now commonly used to describe Aboriginal religion—but often mistakenly linked to a sacred heroic time in the indefinitely remote past. For Stanner, this Indigenous ontology was understood to be past, present, and future. The Aboriginal people with whom he worked did not see a separation between mind, body, and spirit, and personality, name, totem, and features of the landscape. The Dreaming was a record of things that had once happened, a charter of things still to happen, and a kind of sacred logos or principle of order transcending all else.
How then to access and learn from this profound concept?
The multiple and varied voices in this book all address the challenge of deep history across time and languages from very different perspectives. Through first-person explanations from Indigenous experts and academic researchers, the reader is exposed to many thoughtful insights into the manner in which Aboriginal peoples view the past and how these understandings challenge academic epistemologies. The chapter by Aboriginal linguist Jakelin Troy, for example, is especially poignant. She uses oral history, archaeology, and documentary histories created about and by Ngarigu peoples to provide insight into how Indigenous languages speak of time and history. Catherine Frieman’s chapter explains how Eurocentric chronologies and perceptions of time have shaped the discipline of archaeology, including the cultural-technological evolutionary frameworks that imposed particular values onto Indigenous peoples, distorting their understandings of the past as static, primitive, and lacking innovation. She calls for better ways of conceiving the deep past.
A final example is Indigenous author Shannon Foster’s description of how D’harawal people of the Sydney region uphold a living tradition in the midst of Australia’s largest city. She takes the reader on a journey through her country, conveying a powerful sense of connection to ancient places, including to the engraved traces of sea and land creatures carved on rocks but now engulfed in overgrown vegetation. For Foster, her custodial duties include such walking on her traditional lands, an act that suspends the colonizing ruptures and traumas of the past and is a particularly moving example of the concept of everywhen.
This is an important volume that raises many questions for future academic studies. The editors state that only when global deep history is informed by Indigenous historicities will it reach its full potential. This book makes a substantial contribution in that very direction.
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[Review length: 638 words • Review posted on March 5, 2025]