Patrick Nunn

In pre-literate (oral) societies, important knowledge was acquired and communicated for the same reasons as it is in today’s literate societies. This knowledge included information about memorable impactful events (like natural disasters) which had occurred in the past. This information included details of the causes and control (spiritual and physical) of disasters, the recognition of their precursors, and the responses that enabled people’s survival and recovery. While much of this knowledge has been lost, largely because of the replacement of oral by literate contexts, enough remains for us to obtain a general picture of its importance and persistence.
Using examples from across the world, several issues are explored. First, there is an account of the nature of knowledge acquisition and communication in oral societies, something that included storytelling, poetry, song, dance and even art. Second, there is a discussion of the longevity of memory in oral societies, illustrated by securely-dated geological phenomena like volcanic eruptions and (postglacial) sea-level rise, which demonstrates that memorable events can be retained in oral contexts for several thousand years. Third, this chapter discusses the comparative evolution of risk management in oral and literate societies, arguing that the former are/were no less risk averse than the latter. Finally, there is a discussion of why oral knowledges are important today, both to contextualize modern worldviews and to offer more hope for the future.

Oral traditions, especially contrasted with written history, are typically portrayed as inaccurate. Commenting on native title claims in the US, Simic (2000) made the specific claim: "As a general rule, unwritten legends that refer to events more than 1,000 years in the past contain little, if any, historical truth". So can preliterate Indigenous languages tell us anything factual about the distant past, or does the transmission of historical facts become inevitably corrupted? Changes in sea levels around the Australian coast are now well established. Marine geographers can now point to specific parts of the Australian coast and know with some confidence what the sea levels were at a particular time before the present. This paper reports on a substantial body of Australian Aboriginal stories that appear to represent genuine and unique observations of post-glacial increases in sea level, at time depths that range from about 13,400-7,500 years BP. This paper makes the case that endangered Indigenous languages can be repositories for factual knowledge across time depths far greater than previously imagined, forcing a rethink of the ways in which such traditions have been dismissed.