Australian Books: A life in ruins

Saturday, 21st May 2011

John Mulvaney’s is scarcely a household name, but it should be. More perhaps than any other Australian, he can take credit for establishing what is now a generally accepted fact, one that has shaped our national consciousness to a profound degree: human settlement on this continent dates back at least 50,000 years.

Digging Up A Past
By John Mulvaney
UNSW Press, $59.95, pp. 348
ISBN 9781742232195

John Mulvaney’s is scarcely a household name, but it should be. More perhaps than any other Australian, he can take credit for establishing what is now a generally accepted fact, one that has shaped our national consciousness to a profound degree: human settlement on this continent dates back at least 50,000 years.

Just 50 years ago the consensus of Australian opinion — expert and lay — was quite different. It was thought that the history of pre-1770 Aboriginal civilisation could be measured in centuries, not millennia; moreover, all Aboriginal societies were assumed to have been static and primitive (‘a relic of the early childhood of mankind left stranded’, in the words of one notable anthropologist).

Accordingly, until the 1960s, Aboriginal pre-history, art and culture barely merited consideration. A few spirited amateurs looted artefacts from sites at ground level, stone tools and such, but that was about it. The notion that Australian soil might yield treasures of the sort unearthed in Greece or Egypt just wasn’t entertained.

Mulvaney’s achievement — accomplished between, roughly, 1955 and 1975 — was to overturn these conceptions. Of course, he didn’t do it single-handedly, and he was fortunate that his career coincided with the development in America of radio-carbon dating. Even so, he enjoys a deserved reputation as ‘the Father of Australian Archaeology’.

Now in his mid-eighties, Mulvaney’s impressive life story is told straightforwardly and well in this recently-released autobiography.

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