Billy Griffiths

This speaks to a bigger story, and one of the reasons we wrote the book, actually, is to get the public more engaged with our own history of the continent.

And one of the most astounding things, when I do public speaking and training and things...

Getting people to envisage a continent when the sea levels are 130 metres lower than they are today.

And the reality is that for the majority of the human history of our continent, it didn't look anything like it does today.

So if you lower the sea level by 130 metres, it exposes all of the continental shelves around Australia and connects what we now know as Australia to both Tasmania and New Guinea to form the supercontinent of Sahul.

And that's how we find Majabibi, 350 kilometres inland at the time it was first occupied, maybe before 65,000 years ago.

Well, I think this is something Robin, you and I have talked about before, this conservatism about the age of the people of the continent.

And certainly over my career, that's crept upwards from 40,000 years 30 years ago to 45,000 years to 50,000 years and grudgingly, you know, maybe 51,000 years.

And we've known that Majabibi is much older than that for a long time.

In fact...

Back in 1990, early 1990s, my colleague Bert Roberts led a study showing that those sites were at least 55,000, 60,000 years ago, but there was a real pushback against accepting those arguments because the prevailing view was that Australia can't have been colonised that long ago.

I think that's right.

I mean, I think one of the objections to accepting an early age for the peopling of Australia was there was no sites of that age or older in Wallasia, in the islands between the Southeast Asian mainland and Australia.

And the argument from people who were inclined to think that

of a much shorter age for the people in Australia was, well, show me the archaeological evidence for these places in the trackway, the routes that people must have migrated.

And just at the end of last year, colleagues out of Griffith University published a study from Sulawesi, which furthered results we already knew about from Borneo, that art there had been created at least by 67,000 years ago.

Now, that makes it the earliest art we know about in the world made by our own species, by Homo sapiens, that the only other art approaching that age is from Spain, which is attributed to Neanderthals.

One of the things when we sat down to think about what are the central pillars of this book and one of them was centering Indigenous voice and exploring different ways of seeing country and underlying that was an emphasis on avoiding homogenising First Nations experiences and knowledges and I think one of the things that even with greater awareness of First Nations issues

In public policy, in research, the experiences of First Nations peoples are often homogenised as a singular whole, but of course, like any nation, they have their own histories and knowledge systems, languages, social customs, and I think

The next frontier in disciplines like archaeology and in history is actually not only acknowledging that diversity but supporting unpacking them.