I am very happy to have had the chance to analyse Billy Griffiths’ Deep Time Dreaming – a book which considers non-Indigenous Australia’s coming to terms with it’s Indigenous past.

The excellence of Griffiths’ work is to use archeological discovery as a prism to reflect on issues of dispossession, identity and socio-political change.

It is an important and relevant work. As I write:

Today we can be tempted to take (…) social and political gains for granted, but this would be a mistake: by failing to recognise the significant battles that have been fought to assert the rights of Indigenous Peoples, we may come to regard the present as static, and the status quo as immovable.

This is the goal of conservative politics and the History Wars: to strike at the very heart of the idea that progress is possible, let alone necessary. By severing the past from the present, issues of structural inequality and institutionalised racism can be minimised. Griffiths’ book therefore is a call to consciousness, so that we might understand how far we have come, and how far we have still to go.

You can read my piece over on Medium, or at The Big Smoke.

Billy Griffiths’ Deep Time Dreaming is available now through Black Inc.