Australia and its peoples is vast and deep

It’s one you should know, but possibly one you’ve never been told. Well, not like this anyway.

This story by Solua Middleton, Margaret Burin, Ben Spraggon, Joshua Byrd and Matt Liddy, with artwork by Abby Richards.

Deep Time is a Story Lab production in collaboration with senior contributors and knowledge holders.

The grounds on which you walk and the waters in which you play have been home to people for tens of thousands of years.

If you look to the night sky, the stars you’ll see are much the same as the ones that people slept under 65,000 years ago.

But the place where you live likely looks very different from how it did back then.

The first peoples of this land have lived alongside giant animals that no longer exist, survived and adapted in an ice age and seen dramatic sea level rises that engulfed their homelands.

It’s hard to know exactly what life was like back then. Only those ancient ancestors will ever know.

But some of their stories from a time so long ago remain.

They are written into the stars; they’re carried on in songs, in ceremonies, in dances, and in oral histories that have been passed down from one generation to the next.

Thanks to the dozens of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who have generously granted permission for their cultural knowledge to be shared with you. It’s only with their help that we can tell you this epic story.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are advised that this project contains the names of people who have died.

For many Aboriginal people, the story begins at the creation of time, space, and place.

From the north to the east to the west, stories have been passed down that speak of a dark, flat and formless land.

Spirit beings were responsible for the creation of the land, the sea and the sky, and all the things within them.

That’s why Aboriginal people say they have been here since the beginning of time.

Dreaming or spirit beings created and influenced systems of beliefs which guide people on what they need to know to survive and care for everything around them.

They are embodied in the world all around us, within places and animals.

Similarly, Torres Strait Islander people have spiritual beings that created the land, the laws, the animals. Some also guide Islanders on how to live in harmony with the land, seas and each other.

Oral histories made sure that knowledge was passed from one generation to the next to maintain that strong relationship to Country.

Everything has a story.

Every place. Every animal. Every life lesson.

The spiritual world interconnects with the physical world.

It is the past, the present, the future.

It is everywhere, everywhen.

Aboriginal peoples have been living in this place we call Australia for at least 65,000 years — surviving and thriving through almost unimaginable changes to the land, the sea and the climate.

That time scale might be hard to wrap your head around, but the people who lived here then were much like you and me.

They felt fear, compassion, love. They were creative and practical, making the tools and shaping the spaces they needed for their everyday lives.

Around this time, the sea was 70 metres lower than it is today, meaning the land looked very different too.

Scientists call this mega-continent Sahul.

Some researchers have a theory that this is when people migrated here from Africa, crossing through Sunda, another mega-continent that is known as South-East Asia today.

People walked this land alongside giant animals that had been evolving for millions of years.

Today, they’re known as megafauna.

There was a wombat-like creature the size of a rhino, called the Diprotodon, as well as actual giant wombats and huge kangaroos that could prop themselves up to pick leaves from trees.

Not to mention the meat-eating marsupial lion that was one of the land’s top predators for 2 million years.

Imagine walking past or dodging some of those on your way to the local waterhole.

Many of these giant animals became extinct about 45,000 years ago, possibly due to hunting, the climate drying out — or a combination of both.

Not only did the people of this land live alongside those giant animals, they also survived through the peak of an ice age.

Water was sucked out of the oceans to form ice sheets in places like Antarctica and the polar caps expanded.

It meant the land was cold, dry and mostly desert. There were glaciers on mountains in Lutruwita (Tasmania) and the Snowy Mountains, near a place some know as Kunama Namadgi and others call Mount Kosciuszko.

More land becomes exposed as the seas retreat. If you were an avid rambler, it’s now possible to walk from Papua New Guinea down to Lutruwita.

To tackle this challenging environment people had to work harder to find food, shelter, water and resources for their families.

Over time, the land and the sea changed once again.

When the ice age ended, people experienced the oceans engulfing their land as the ice melted.

Think about some of today’s well-known waterways — Sydney Harbour, the island-dotted Whitsundays, Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay — all of these places were once dry land.

Lutruwita is cut off from the mainland, and the Great Barrier Reef, Tiwi Islands and the Torres Strait Islands all start to take the form we know today.

About 100 islands will form across Zenadth Kes (Torres Strait) surrounded by waters and reefs.

At Murujuga in the west, people documented their transition from desert people to coastal people.

Images of desert animals such as the fat-tailed kangaroo and the tasmanian tiger, which once lived on the mainland, are pictured alongside images of crabs, turtles and dugongs.

The seas stabilised about 5,000 years ago and populations began to thrive.

People built complex societies and lived by law and lore, often upheld and enforced by elders, helping them to live with one another, the land and the living things around them.

They’d developed an intimate relationship with the land, the sea and the sky.

Countless generations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have used the night sky as a library of their knowledge and traditions.

The first Australians were among the world’s first astronomers, with a long and deep knowledge of the moon, the stars and visible planets.

The stars serve as a compass, a calendar, a map, and a guide for life.

They signal when it’s time to hunt, perform ceremonies and the best time to travel.

The emu in the sky Dreaming is one of the ancient stories that continues to be told today by communities thousands of kilometres away from one another.

The shape of an emu is formed from a dark silhouette within the Milky Way.

The giant sky bird moves throughout the year, informing people when the animal is laying and nesting and the best time to hunt the giant bird.

Around Broome on Western Australia’s Kimberley coast, Goolarabooloo people hold a connection to dinosaurs via Marella, an emu man whose tracks they’ve seen on the ground but who now lives up in the sky.

He looks down on everyone and makes sure that the rules and laws that he set are being followed.

Scientists say the tracks the Goolarabooloo people consider to be Marella’s are fossilised dinosaur footprints, left behind 130 million years ago.

In another section of the sky, a constellation known as the Seven Sisters, or Pleiades, holds lessons of family, kinship and creation of the land.

This same constellation is known to carry similar stories of seven women or sisters among Indigenous people in America, as well as in ancient Greece.

For thousands of years the first peoples of this land have continued to have an intimate understanding of ancient astronomy that signals when the best times are to hunt, harvest, perform ceremony and travel.

The people of the Torres Strait also use the stars for their everyday life.

There is a constellation of stars that shows a man standing in a canoe. It is known as Tagai or Thagay, a Zugub or spirit being who takes the form of a human when on land.

Thagay plays an important role in helping Islanders understand the best time to hunt turtles and dugongs, signals the start of the monsoon season and the best time to navigate between islands.

In much of the country today, light pollution means the full sky is not visible.

But for a long time, people found a map in the night sky.

For millennia, people have travelled long distances across land and sea, trading goods, holding ceremonies, sharing knowledge and building complex connections.

Ancient trade routes crisscross the continent, and important meeting places dot the land.

Sought-after goods were often traded across hundreds or even thousands of kilometres — this includes boomerangs, stone axes, ochre, pear shells, spinifex resin, feathers, didgeridoos, whale meat, possum skin rugs and cloaks, bone ornaments and even hair.

On long journeys, a stone axe head might be wrapped in paperbark to protect it.

Sometimes, items were traded several times through different nations.

These routes are also used to exchange ceremony, ritual, song, dance and knowledge between different groups. They became so established that many of our major roads and highways today trace their ancient paths.

But travel wasn’t just reserved for the feet, with sophisticated watercraft built and used in different parts of the country.

The Ngaro (canoe) people on what will become Queensland’s Whitsunday Islands become self-sufficient and skilled sea people who can read and traverse the ocean.

From their four-metre-long watercraft, they can hunt turtles and whales, and trade with other tribes along the coast and hinterland.

Each language group has its own laws governing their cultural practices, including marriage rites, as well as hunting and collecting certain animals and plants at the right time.

They also guide how and when people can travel on one another’s land.

Message sticks are used for long-distance communication between tribes and nations, even though different languages and dialects are spoken.

Neighbours also connect through songlines, an encoded way of looking at the world via pathways of cultural knowledge that criss-cross across the landscape marked through significant site, cultural practise, dance, songs, and sometimes the night sky.

People make pilgrimages across the country for gatherings, festivals and ceremony.

Groups from around the country use star maps to make their way to what is now known as the Bunya Mountains in south-east Queensland.

It becomes a meeting place for a triennial festival dedicated to the bunya nut from the towering pines of the area. People take part in ceremony, trade resources and knowledge, and build connections.

Along the way to the event, people stop about 100 kilometres south of the mountains to take part in men’s ceremonies at Gummingurru.

Not far away is our nation’s capital, Canberra, a place steeped in a rich tradition of governance and law. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that all started with the construction of Parliament House.

The name Canberra comes from a Ngunnawal word meaning meeting place.

For a long time, Ngunnawal people would come together with other neighbouring tribes at a site where Parliament House now sits.

As people go about their daily lives, they become expert at managing Country — using the natural resources around them in ingenious and sustainable ways.

They engineer and modify the landscape to ensure a reliable food supply, coming up with innovative ways to feed their families.

Sites that were used for farming and aquaculture will remain for generations.

Sometimes a little help from the animal world meant greater rewards.

The Kombumerri people from the Gold Coast region have a special relationship with gwondo (dolphins), who chase fish into the shore, ensuring those fishing have an easier catch.

For at least 40,000 years, people have held spiritual beliefs and conducted ritual burials.

At Lake Mungo, now a dried-up lake bed in the south west of NSW, the dunes have preserved snapshots of life spanning many thousands of years.

Around 42,000 years ago, a woman living on the lake’s shores was given a ritual cremation and burial by her family.

Mungo Lady’s remains are among some of the oldest of modern humans found outside Africa, and rewrote the history books, proving Aboriginal people had been here at least 20,000 years longer than scientists had previously thought.

Many traditional custodians believe she revealed herself to tell the world a much bigger story about Aboriginal peoples and their continuous occupation and connection to Country.

Enormous diversity emerges amongst the Indigenous peoples of this continent — hundreds of different languages are spoken and separate nation groups spread across the land.

But the connections run deep too — through songlines, shared philosophies, the ways people source food, tell stories, govern themselves, study the stars and express themselves through art and dance.

Eventually, ways of life, populations, homelands, societal structures, and people’s relationship with the land will be threatened and disturbed by those from across far waters.

Imagine seeing large floating vessels sailing into the shore for the first time, unsure of their business and curious to know if they are friend or foe.

While no witness from that time is alive, early contact with Europeans is documented in north-west Arnhem Land from about 300 years ago.

It’s not long after those sightings that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s way of life will change forever, and lead us to the Australia you know today.

Illegal claims and laws from a foreign country are imposed on sovereign peoples and their societies.

Indeed, this land wasn’t unoccupied or uninhabited.

Even Cook acknowledged this in his journal on April 21, 1770, referencing seeing smoke in several places ‘a certain sign that the Country is inhabited’.

This continent was home to a thriving population with established and sophisticated societies.

At the time of colonisation, there were hundreds of groups of people who lived across the continent, each with their own language, culture, traditions and sets of laws.

And the arrival of the ‘white man’ wasn’t a peaceful affair.

As the influx of the British settled on different areas around the nation, new diseases spread and battles broke out between First Nations peoples and the foreigners, leaving a bloody scar on this land’s memory that’s not always captured in our history books.

Generations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples will continue to be impacted by colonisation, suffering displacement as well as the loss of land, culture, language, history, sacred sites, sense of belonging, kinship, cultural rites and more.

But a lot wasn’t.

The stories continued after the ships sailed in.

The first people of this place have survived and carried on their culture and stayed strong in their identity.

They have the longest continuous cultures in the world.

While much of deep time will stay with the ancestors, the stars remain a witness — and here on Earth cultural practice continues, storytelling continues, kinship and traditional law continue.

Today as you walk on the land of Australia’s first peoples, you could be passing by a marker to the past hidden in plain sight. It could be a midden housing the shells and bones from a community feast, a scar tree that was used for a burial or to carve a coolamon, a bora ring used for dance or ceremony, an ancient fish trap.

Or perhaps a person who is the keeper of knowledge.

Tomorrow, as you wake to the dawn of a new day, remember our country’s true story is all around you.

You, too, are now part of that story.

It is part of you.