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From Oral Traditions to Geoscience: Australian Indigenous ways of knowing volcanism through Gugu Badhun stories of the Kinrara eruption ca 7,000 years BP
Dissertation - Research   Open access

From Oral Traditions to Geoscience: Australian Indigenous ways of knowing volcanism through Gugu Badhun stories of the Kinrara eruption ca 7,000 years BP

Leigh Franks
Doctor of Philosophy, University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland
2026
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25907/01122
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L.Franks_Thesis7.75 MBDownloadView
Thesis Open Access CC BY-NC V4.0

Abstract

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander environmental knowledges oral traditions geomythology Indigenous knowledge volcanism deep time Holocene hazard management memory
This thesis investigates Australian Indigenous (Aboriginal) traditions of volcanic activity through a multi-scalar framework that moves from global comparison to regional Australian case studies and finally to a detailed focus on Gugu Badhun stories that plausibly recall the Kinrara eruption ca. 7,000 years BP in northern Queensland. By combining a review of global literature on oral traditions of volcanism with spatial analysis and evaluation of geochronological, ethnographic and palaeoenvironmental evidence, this study examines the extent to which preliterate narratives may preserve memories of volcanic events and related environmental changes across deep time. At the global scale, this study considers oral traditions likely to recall Holocene and late Quaternary volcanic phenomena in preliterate contexts worldwide, asking where such traditions occur, where they do not, and why their preservation is uneven. This comparative perspective provides a global context for understanding the persistence, selectivity, and potential evidential value of Indigenous (culturally grounded) traditions relating to hazardous geological phenomena. At the Australian scale, the thesis examines traditions from southeastern Australia and northern Queensland that appear to recall eruptive phenomena including maar formation, lava flows, ash clouds, ground cracking, fires associated with volcanic activity, toxic gases and abrupt hydrological change. These accounts are assessed in relation to volcanological, geomorphological, archaeological and palaeoenvironmental data in order to evaluate whether specific narrative elements plausibly correspond to the possible volcanic phenomena and associated landscape impacts that contemporary (preliterate) observers may have witnessed. The key case study focuses on Gugu Badhun traditions likely linked to the Kinrara eruption, an event some 7,000 years BP that demonstrably altered river systems, wetlands and dryland landscapes in what is today northern Queensland. These narratives indicate that some Aboriginal oral traditions may retain observations or details of volcanic activity and environmental disruption that are difficult, in some cases impossible, to infer from retrospective geoscientific reconstruction alone. Accordingly, the thesis argues that such traditions possess an evidential potential that remains insufficiently recognised within Western academic scientific contexts. Rather than positioning authenticity as a threshold determined solely by academic scientific convention, this thesis advances the dialogical, inclusive interpretive framework in which Aboriginal analogical ways of knowing and academic analytical geoscience are brought together. It concludes that Australian Aboriginal traditions can be treated as authentic archives of invariant environmental knowledge and as historically informative sources for reconstructing long term human engagement with dynamic landscapes.

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