People would have known about Australia before they saw it. Smoke billowing above the sea spoke of a land that lay beyond the horizon. A dense cloud of migrating birds may have pointed the way. But the first Australians were voyaging into the unknown.

Soon after Billy Griffiths joins his first archaeological dig as camp manager and cook, he is hooked. Equipped with a historian's inquiring mind, he embarks on a journey through time, seeking to understand the extraordinary deep history of the Australian continent. Deep Time Dreaming is the passionate product of that journey.

It investigates a twin revolution: the reassertion of Aboriginal identity in the second half of the twentieth century, and the uncovering of the traces of ancient Australia. It explores what it means to live in a place of great antiquity, with its complex questions of ownership and belonging. It is about a slow shift in national consciousness: the deep time dreaming that has changed the way many of us relate to this continent and its enduring, dynamic human history.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 305-363) and index.

Contents:

Introduction: the old world -- Explorers in an ancient land : John Mulvaney at Fromm's Landing -- Haunted country : Isabel McBryde in New England -- Before it is too late, 1962 -- The first Tasmanians : Rhys Jones at Rocky Cape -- Tracks in the desert : Richard and Betsy Gould at Puntutjarpa -- A desiccated Garden of Eden : Jim Bowler at Lake Mungo -- Eaglehawk and Crow, 1974 -- Landscapes of the mind : Carmel Schire and Betty Meehan in Arnhem Land -- Marking country : Lesley Maynard and 'the Bob Edwards' style -- 'You have entered Aboriginal land' : the Franklin River campaign and the fight for Kutikina -- Australians to 1988 -- A social history of the Holocene : Sylvia Hallam, Harry Lourandos and the archaeology of documents -- Hunting the Pleistocene : the history and politics of Jinmium and Madjedbebe -- Epilogue : Australia's classical culture.