Patrick Nunn

Australian Indigenous Oral Traditions preserve transgenerational memories of geological (and other environmental) events, including hazardous volcanic activity. Details within these recollections are increasingly being recognised for their potential to inform geoscientists and ethnographers about deep-time landscape evolution and related geological processes. Many traditions recall impactful events that changed or created particular landscape features that are well remembered in Indigenous narratives and are plausibly linked to identified locations. Such stories (or ‘geomythologies’) also may include eye-witness accounts of sea-level rise, meteor impacts, tsunami, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, in some cases dating from the Early Holocene (11.7 ka BP) and possibly earlier. Despite enduring memories of eruptive events in Australia, not all volcanism has associated stories, raising questions about the reasons for why some stories may have survived and others did not.

This paper builds on global research into the longevity and accuracy of oral traditions and argues that Australian Aboriginal traditions of volcanism include some of the oldest such narratives of their kind in the world. It also demonstrates how efforts to ‘authenticate’ them (from Western literate-scientific perspectives) can provide a pathway for integrating Indigenous knowledge and academic scientific approaches. This study examines the presence and absence of oral traditions across mapped volcanic provinces and identifies a correlation between story occurrence and areas of geologically recent activity. It also finds a consistent absence of such traditions where eruptive activity is known to predate archaeologically constrained human occupation of the region.

In many parts of the world, especially around Australia where people have lived for ~70,000 years, there are ancient stories that can be interpreted as deriving from observations of postglacial sea-level rise and the effects this had on land and people. Incorporating Indigenous memories of such events can enrich their science-based understanding. Prolonged land loss resulting from postglacial sea-level rise can be clearly shown to have challenged coastal peoples, evoking both practical and physical responses, thousands of years ago.

Prof Patrick Nunn of the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia gave a presentation on risk and resilience in the Pacific—community exposure and response to climate change. In his presentation, he discussed a case study that was conducted to inform improved interventions for climate change adaptation in developing-world communities. The was by (i) demonstrating the diversity of community exposure rather than assuming that “one-size-fits-all”; and (ii), showing the existence and diversity of culturally-grounded community coping in communities. In these ways, a better understanding of risk and resilience among communities who participated in the study has been obtained.