The importance placed on the oral traditions of Aboriginal people should be re-evaluated in light of recent developments in understanding, according to an academic from the University of New England. A team, made up of academics from UNE and Sunshine Coast University, has compared Aboriginal stories about sea level rises to an independently established chronology of sea level rise between 18,000 and 7,000 years ago. Professor Nicholas Reid from UNE said the team found the 21 stories analysed to be an accurate representation of what happened. For full story click here.
Tag: aborigines
Paul Keating oral history
As Paul Keating tells it, it all began at the Hoyts Civic Theatre at Bankstown, NSW, in 1955. He was 11 years old and utterly transfixed – and for years later haunted – by Jedda, the first Australian feature film to use Aboriginal actors in lead roles.
"It was a very powerful film set in the Northern Territory and, in a way, it mirrored aspects of the stolen generations," he tells Kerry O'Brien in Keating, the 794-page narrated oral history of his life in politics. "It ended in tragedy for the two Aboriginal people and left me with a sense that this was their place and we were all interlopers."