Everywhen

I pounced on this book from my new favourite place in the world, the Atheneaum Library, on the strength of the title alone: Everywhen: Australia and the language of deep history. When I give school talks on Crow Country, I try to convey something of the pre-invasion First Nations world view -- the deep interconnectedness of Country, the importance of secrecy and accuracy of knowledge in an oral culture, and their different attitude to time. In the simplest possible terms, while Western cultures tend to conceptualise time like an arrow, or a conveyor belt, moving inexorably from the past into the future, First Nations cultures have a much more cyclical experience of time, tied to the movement of seasons and stars, and a sense of the on-going events of the Dreaming as existing in a kind of living, eternal present, rather than in a distant, far removed past. My understanding is pretty shallow, but the authors of this collection bring a more nuanced and sophisticated approach to this idea.

Honestly, if I'd realised just how scholarly Everywhen was going to be, I might have thought twice about borrowing it, but I'm so glad I persevered. Some of the essays are deeply personal, like Jakelin Troy's account of standing between the snowy mountains of her ancestors and the sky, or Shannon Foster's reflections on being locked away from rock engravings around Sydney, on D'harawal land, in order to 'keep them safe.' There are pieces here that examine the role of music and song, that outline the way performance of ancient songs and stories helps to bring the deep past into the present moment, or the challenge for linguistics of trying to recover the languages lost since white settlement.

After the shock and despair of reading Killing For Country, it was heartening to explore these essays and to realise that there are so many people working so earnestly to preserve, to recover and to engage with the oldest living culture in the world, and hopefully to share a new perspective on what it means to live on and with our fragile planet.