Let's write about the value and accuracy of oral history- Australia is an example

James Bradley is a writer and critic. His new book, “Deep Water: The World in the Ocean,” is available now. In this thrilling work—a blend of history, science, nature writing, and environmentalism—acclaimed writer James Bradley plunges into the unknown to explore the deepest recesses of the natural world.

Amazon review:  "Deep Water is a major achievement....Bradley's skills both as novelist and essayist converge here to create this wise, compassionate and urgent book, characterized throughout by a clarity of prose and a bracing moral gaze that searches water, self and reader." 

Excellent echo report by James Bradley published in The Washington Post:

The written word has long been assumed to be superior to oral traditions — more sophisticated, reliable. This premise has contributed to to many of the darkest episodes in human history — a pretext for violence, dispossession, assimilation and genocide. But the idea that only writing can preserve information over time is no less problematic. Though written records reach back only a few millennia, there is good reason to believe many Australian Indigenous cultures have oral traditions that preserve memories of lands that vanished beneath the sea as much as 12,000 years ago.

To understand how this can be, we need to go back 20,000 years ago, to when the Earth was just emerging from the last glacial maximum. Vast ice sheets covered much of North America and Eurasia and sea levels were about 400 feet lower. Dry land extended from Holland and France to Ireland, and the Bering Strait was a freezing steppe roamed by mammoth and other ancient creatures. Further south, Australia, Lutruwita (Tasmania) and New Guinea were subsumed into a single land mass known as Sahul, with coastlines that lay miles farther than today’s beaches.

In recent years, researchers have begun to reconstruct these vanished underwater worlds using sonar and bathymetric studies that reveal contours of drowned rivers and creeks snaking across the sea floor off Australia’s Bass Strait.

Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands. Australia is the largest country by area in Oceania and the world's sixth-largest country.

These lost worlds were not just physical spaces; however, they were also human landscapes. The ancestors of today’s Indigenous Australians first arrived in Sahul more than 65,000 years ago. For these ancient peoples, these now-vanished lands were living places. Evidence of this is gradually emerging: in 2019, a team at Flinders University identified Australia’s first subtidal Indigenous archaeological sites at Murujuga, in Western Australia, recovering several hundred stone artifacts dating back around 8,000 years from submerged sites up to 45 feet below the surface.

But archaeology is not the only lens through which to understand these submerged lands.

For many thousands of years, the Mirning people have lived along the edge of the Great Australian Bight on Australia’s Southern Coast. Their elders tell stories about visitors to Mirning Country that stretch back to the arrival of Dutch explorers in the 1600s. 

But the memories encoded in the Mirning’s culture extend much further back, to what they call “the time before the sea.”

The Mirning’s traditions recount the reshaping of the coastline by the rising ocean and its effects upon the creatures that once inhabited the continental shelf. The now-submerged region remains part of the Mirning’s Country — a place they call Billiaum, or Deep Sea Country home. For the Mirning, Billiaum is a living place structured around sacred sites that it is their duty to protect. One of the most significant of these is the site they call Bingarning, which is rich in the red ocher — an important element of Mirning ceremonies. Today, the Mirning rely on ocher that washes up to the shore, which they would collect directly from Bingarning before rising seas immersed the site.

The Mirning are far from the only Australian Indigenous culture whose traditions recall a time before sea levels rose. 

Over the past decade, Patrick Nunn, a professor of geography at the University of the Sunshine Coast, has identified oral traditions from more than 30 locations around the Australian coast that detail rising sea levels. For example, in Lutruwita, which was last attached to the mainland around 12,000 years ago, Palawa stories collected in the 1830s say the island “was settled by emigrants from a far country, that they came here on land [and] that the sea was subsequently formed.” 

Meanwhile on the opposite side of Bass Strait, Gunaikurnai traditions say the strait was flooded after some children found a sacred artifact that was for only men’s use and took it back to camp to show to the women. 

Similarly, Kulin and Bunurong traditions recorded in the 19th century speak of a time when it was possible to walk across Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay.

Although there is no way of definitively proving that such traditions describe postglacial sea level rise, their ubiquity is telling, especially in instances such as the Palawa stories about the inundation of the Bass Strait land bridge and the Mirning’s ochre story, both of which offer practical accounts of changing conditions.

More importantly, there is now clear evidence oral cultures are capable of transmitting information over huge periods of time. Palawa traditions depict a bright star near the southern celestial pole, which University of Melbourne astronomers have identified as Canopus: a star that last lay close to the celestial pole around 14,000 years ago. ☆🌟In other words, these Palawa accounts are up to 10,000 years older❗ than the oldest written texts.

For those of us embedded in written cultures, this might be difficult to fathom. Yet, as history has demonstrated on multiple occasions ― from the burning of the Library of Alexandria to the pillage of the Baghdad House of Wisdom ― archives and libraries are highly vulnerable, meaning written knowledge is frequently erased or forgotten. 

In contrast, stories woven into Indigenous cultures are part of a fabric of knowledge and reciprocal obligation that is carefully preserved. John McCarthy, an archaeologist at South Australia’s Flinders University who helped uncover the subtidal Murujuga sites, says these surviving memories are not surprising. “There’s a very strong emphasis upon the integrity of transmission of oral traditions in Aboriginal cultures, and all sorts of mechanisms that punish people who fail to transmit customs and dreaming stories accurately.”

Jilda Andrews, a Yuwaalaraay woman and Research Fellow at the Australian National University, argues that this continuity is a reminder of the deep repositories of knowledge encoded in Indigenous cultures. “Our culture is inscribed in the land, and country is our text,” she explains. “We don’t have vast libraries that are written down, it’s country that’s ensuring the continuities, and that’s giving us the cues and instructions that help us to remember to keep telling the stories.”

Understood like this, these stories offer a powerful corrective to the ingrained assumption of written culture’s superiority. And in a world where temperatures and sea levels are once again rising, a recognition of the depth of Indigenous memory offers a way to break out of short-term thinking and narratives of collapse. 

By demonstrating continuity stretching back thousands of years, they also provide a model for imagining the future, and prompt us to think about how our actions today will shape it.