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Everywhen: Australia and the Language of Deep History
Everywhen is a groundbreaking collection about diverse ways of conceiving, knowing, and narrating time and deep history. Looking beyond the linear documentary past of Western or academic history, this collection asks how knowledge systems of Australia’s Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders can broaden our understandings of the past and of historical practice. Indigenous embodied practices for knowing, narrating, and reenacting the past in the present blur the distinctions of linear time, making all history now . Ultimately, questions of time and language are questions of Indigenous sovereignty. The Australian case is especially pertinent because Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are among the few Native peoples without a treaty with their colonizers. Appreciating First Nations’ time concepts embedded in languages and practices, as Everywhen does, is a route to recognizing diverse forms of Indigenous sovereignties.
Everywhen makes three major contributions. The first is a concentration on language, both as a means of knowing and transmitting the past across generations and as a vital, albeit long-overlooked source material for historical investigation, to reveal how many Native people maintained and continue to maintain ancient traditions and identities through language. Everywhen also considers Indigenous practices of history, or knowing the past, that stretch back more than sixty thousand years; these Indigenous epistemologies might indeed challenge those of the academy. Finally, the volume explores ways of conceiving time across disciplinary boundaries and across cultures, revealing how the experience of time itself is mediated by embodied practices and disciplinary norms.
Everywhen brings Indigenous knowledges to bear on the study and meaning of the past and of history itself. It seeks to draw attention to every when, arguing that Native time concepts and practices are vital to understanding Native histories and, further, that they may offer a new framework for history as practiced in the Western academy.
Everywhen makes three major contributions. The first is a concentration on language, both as a means of knowing and transmitting the past across generations and as a vital, albeit long-overlooked source material for historical investigation, to reveal how many Native people maintained and continue to maintain ancient traditions and identities through language. Everywhen also considers Indigenous practices of history, or knowing the past, that stretch back more than sixty thousand years; these Indigenous epistemologies might indeed challenge those of the academy. Finally, the volume explores ways of conceiving time across disciplinary boundaries and across cultures, revealing how the experience of time itself is mediated by embodied practices and disciplinary norms.
Everywhen brings Indigenous knowledges to bear on the study and meaning of the past and of history itself. It seeks to draw attention to every when, arguing that Native time concepts and practices are vital to understanding Native histories and, further, that they may offer a new framework for history as practiced in the Western academy.
326 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 14, 2024
Everywhen: Australia and the Language of Deep History is a fantastic volume written from the perspectives of Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists, linguists, historians, ethnomusicologists, archaeologists, and a number of others.
The volume challenges linear, and indeed Western, notions of temporality, providing more comprehensive and nuanced discussions of Indigenous Australian histories and their perceptions of time, space, and landscape. The volume presents a nice mix of academic, personal, and community-based learnings, from the knowledge of the deep past that might be gleaned via linguistic information, interactions between colonisers and Indigenous people, the temporal considerations of missionaries in their attempts to spread the bible to Indigenous people, place-based connections to the past, and a host of other very interesting contributions.
I listened to this one in the car and enjoyed it very much.
The volume challenges linear, and indeed Western, notions of temporality, providing more comprehensive and nuanced discussions of Indigenous Australian histories and their perceptions of time, space, and landscape. The volume presents a nice mix of academic, personal, and community-based learnings, from the knowledge of the deep past that might be gleaned via linguistic information, interactions between colonisers and Indigenous people, the temporal considerations of missionaries in their attempts to spread the bible to Indigenous people, place-based connections to the past, and a host of other very interesting contributions.
I listened to this one in the car and enjoyed it very much.
April 11, 2023
This is an interesting collection of chapters, which will have different interest depending on readers' perspectives. The editors themselves note in their quite lengthy and excellent introduction that "the contributors do not all agree with each other", and "that juxtaposing Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspectives... will inevitably introduce some sharp contrasts of style". It is hard to know how to describe the complex focus: "language both as a means of knowing and transmitting the past across generations and as source material for historical investigation", and the title is probably not going to help attract readers.
I particularly enjoyed Chapter 10 on the 13 different versions of a Wik story of early encounters with the Dutch in northern Queensland, and Chapter 12 on the living heritage of the Dharawal Country people where I live in Sydney, where the trail of Gymea lilies marks a songline from the forest country to the coast to celebrate the whale.
With the notes and bibliography for each chapter, it is not as long (and daunting) as it may first look.
I particularly enjoyed Chapter 10 on the 13 different versions of a Wik story of early encounters with the Dutch in northern Queensland, and Chapter 12 on the living heritage of the Dharawal Country people where I live in Sydney, where the trail of Gymea lilies marks a songline from the forest country to the coast to celebrate the whale.
With the notes and bibliography for each chapter, it is not as long (and daunting) as it may first look.
May 13, 2025
"In his 1956 essay the anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner uses [everywhen] to encapsulate the temporal element of what his teachers, Muta, a Murinbata man, and Durmugam, a Nagiomeri from the far north of the Northern Territory of Australia, understood as the time of 'the Dreaming'. Dreaming was an English translation to describe the Indigenous ontology of the past, present, and future. As with various North American tribes, Indigenous Australians' dreams and visions delivered revelations, including complex interpretive stories about the past and present - in other words, forms of historical interpretation. Stanner notes that people did not see a separation between mind, body, spirit and personality, name, totem, and features in the landscape.
In Western eyes the Dreaming is often mistakenly understood to encompass a sacred heroic time and the 'indefinitely remote past'. Rather, it is also part of the present and future."
"The concept of everywhen unsettles the way historians and archaeologists have conventionally treated time - as a linear narrative that moves toward increasing progress and complexity."
My favourite essay was 'Across "Koori Time" and Space' by John Maynard.
"My grandfather, the legendary Aboriginal activist Fred Maynard, stated powerfully in 1927 that the trade union movement was seeking the same conditions and management of time that had existed on our country before invasion, when 'men only worked when necessary, called no man master and had no king.'"
"For Aboriginal people, 'Creation time isn't a 'long, long ago' event because creation is still unfolding now, and will continue to if we know how to know it...[There is] no start and finish but a constant state where past, present and future are all one thing, one time, one place.'" (Sand Talk, Tyson Yunkaporta).
Robert Lawlor: "The outstanding difference is that the [Aboriginal peoples] move through space, and we move through time."
On the Shoes of the Narinya - Shannon Foster
"I see the processes of time and knowledge as like weaving. When we pick up durawi (grass), from the very first movements we are aware that we work the durawi, we are laying a foundation for something else be built on it. No stitch is created and then forgotten. Each remains as deeply important as when it was created, long after it was necessary in the immediate moment, in the actions of weaving and stringing. Like each loop and twist in woven grass, the past, the present, and the future all coexist within our knowledges. They are reciprocally entwined, one does not exist without the other."
"This creative period can be thought of as belonging to a deep present rather than a deep past, in that ancestral power continues to reside in and activate the experiential world. Through ceremonial embodiment of the activities and words of totemic ancestors passed on via previous generations, performers create multilayered stores emplaced in Country, from which contemporary identities emerge."
“[The past] lives on in a kind of eternal present”
“Homogenous, empty time” Walter Benjamin
"For many aboriginal people time is neither exclusively linear nor cyclical but is 'always'."
"Understanding the past as represented in a continuous now."
"Repatriation of archival material, often scattered around the globe, and enhancing it and enriching it with community knowledge may 'enable revelatory visceral experiences that unlock…relational understandings." Clint Bracknell
Land, water and sky all connect as one space
engaging with emotional history “engaging as a researcher with historical information to gain a more sensorial experience of history - to feel or sense the moment and understand complexities that less emotional engagements miss.”
“At the top of the alps we’re people who belonged to the crow moeity, and now those people are only crows.”
Loss of language means loss of identity and tens of thousands of years of accumulated knowledge, that is distilled into songs and traditions.
Imagine trying to be yourself without your memory. How can Indigenous people understand their identity if they don’t know about where they’re from, their connections, their culture?
Peter Yu, Yawuru man: "For all people, language is the expression of a worldview, and of a value system. It contains the signifiers of cultural different. It plays a crucial role for our people in expressing our social identity, in capturing family relationships, in speaking to connections to places and to country. It is the vehicle by which cultural difference is communicated from parent to child - it is through language that children acquire the ways and world views of their culture..."
"Language is not only a way of describing the world. It is in fact a way of knowing and comprehending the world, and of understanding oneself, relating to others and reading the natural world."
Minoru Hokari worked closely with the Gurindji people at Wave Hill, NT: "history always realised itself in the present, because without human efforts to perform the events and experiences of the past, the past never becomes history....The Gurindji people have been a part of moral history because they have been participating in sustaining the world by following the Dreaming,...the 'right way'"
"Tenets of balance, respect, interdependence and shared responsibility are fundamental to ensuring good governance, legal consistency and fair dealing in Indigenous legal systems....Despite the Crown's attempted erasure of Indigenous law and governance structures via discriminatory policies and practices, these structures nonetheless ensure in Australia and continue to constantly adapt to new needs and circumstances. Moreover, despite the enduring disadvantages wrought upon Indigenous communities by the great injustices of colonisation, racism and assimilation policies since 1788 Indigenous leaders still seek to enter a fair deal with the Australian Government."
In Western eyes the Dreaming is often mistakenly understood to encompass a sacred heroic time and the 'indefinitely remote past'. Rather, it is also part of the present and future."
"The concept of everywhen unsettles the way historians and archaeologists have conventionally treated time - as a linear narrative that moves toward increasing progress and complexity."
My favourite essay was 'Across "Koori Time" and Space' by John Maynard.
"My grandfather, the legendary Aboriginal activist Fred Maynard, stated powerfully in 1927 that the trade union movement was seeking the same conditions and management of time that had existed on our country before invasion, when 'men only worked when necessary, called no man master and had no king.'"
"For Aboriginal people, 'Creation time isn't a 'long, long ago' event because creation is still unfolding now, and will continue to if we know how to know it...[There is] no start and finish but a constant state where past, present and future are all one thing, one time, one place.'" (Sand Talk, Tyson Yunkaporta).
Robert Lawlor: "The outstanding difference is that the [Aboriginal peoples] move through space, and we move through time."
On the Shoes of the Narinya - Shannon Foster
"I see the processes of time and knowledge as like weaving. When we pick up durawi (grass), from the very first movements we are aware that we work the durawi, we are laying a foundation for something else be built on it. No stitch is created and then forgotten. Each remains as deeply important as when it was created, long after it was necessary in the immediate moment, in the actions of weaving and stringing. Like each loop and twist in woven grass, the past, the present, and the future all coexist within our knowledges. They are reciprocally entwined, one does not exist without the other."
"This creative period can be thought of as belonging to a deep present rather than a deep past, in that ancestral power continues to reside in and activate the experiential world. Through ceremonial embodiment of the activities and words of totemic ancestors passed on via previous generations, performers create multilayered stores emplaced in Country, from which contemporary identities emerge."
“[The past] lives on in a kind of eternal present”
“Homogenous, empty time” Walter Benjamin
"For many aboriginal people time is neither exclusively linear nor cyclical but is 'always'."
"Understanding the past as represented in a continuous now."
"Repatriation of archival material, often scattered around the globe, and enhancing it and enriching it with community knowledge may 'enable revelatory visceral experiences that unlock…relational understandings." Clint Bracknell
Land, water and sky all connect as one space
engaging with emotional history “engaging as a researcher with historical information to gain a more sensorial experience of history - to feel or sense the moment and understand complexities that less emotional engagements miss.”
“At the top of the alps we’re people who belonged to the crow moeity, and now those people are only crows.”
Loss of language means loss of identity and tens of thousands of years of accumulated knowledge, that is distilled into songs and traditions.
Imagine trying to be yourself without your memory. How can Indigenous people understand their identity if they don’t know about where they’re from, their connections, their culture?
Peter Yu, Yawuru man: "For all people, language is the expression of a worldview, and of a value system. It contains the signifiers of cultural different. It plays a crucial role for our people in expressing our social identity, in capturing family relationships, in speaking to connections to places and to country. It is the vehicle by which cultural difference is communicated from parent to child - it is through language that children acquire the ways and world views of their culture..."
"Language is not only a way of describing the world. It is in fact a way of knowing and comprehending the world, and of understanding oneself, relating to others and reading the natural world."
Minoru Hokari worked closely with the Gurindji people at Wave Hill, NT: "history always realised itself in the present, because without human efforts to perform the events and experiences of the past, the past never becomes history....The Gurindji people have been a part of moral history because they have been participating in sustaining the world by following the Dreaming,...the 'right way'"
"Tenets of balance, respect, interdependence and shared responsibility are fundamental to ensuring good governance, legal consistency and fair dealing in Indigenous legal systems....Despite the Crown's attempted erasure of Indigenous law and governance structures via discriminatory policies and practices, these structures nonetheless ensure in Australia and continue to constantly adapt to new needs and circumstances. Moreover, despite the enduring disadvantages wrought upon Indigenous communities by the great injustices of colonisation, racism and assimilation policies since 1788 Indigenous leaders still seek to enter a fair deal with the Australian Government."
January 18, 2025
Great book, but an academic text. A lot of it went a bit over my head...
March 8, 2025
A very interesting and well written book about Aboriginal language and concepts of time
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews