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 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.

History and Memory: Oral Histories and the Science of the Dreaming The power of recall in oral societies is phenomenal … but many scientists have only just started to understand this and think about its implications. In Australia, some of the stories that have been told longest are about ocean rise after the last ice age and the effects of volcanic eruptions, both topics which are covered in this talk. Geologist and climate scientist, Patrick Nunn, Professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast, has written extensively about how many ‘myths and legends’ are not fictions but culturally filtered memories.