Our fragile heritage 'in need of stories'

November 22, 2007

An archaeologist from the University of New England, Professor Iain Davidson, has emphasised the importance of "storytelling" in preserving our material heritage.

For example, the preservation of the remarkable works of Aboriginal rock art (such as that pictured here) in north-western Australia's Dampier Archipelago, in the face of encroaching industrial development and natural gas exploitation, depended on relating the art to "stories that everyone wants to hear", he said. "Only then will public opinion prevent further damage to it."

Professor Davidson was presenting this year's Academy Lecture at the Annual Symposium of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in Brisbane last week. His topic (and that of the symposium as a whole) was the impact of new technologies in the humanities. "Although new technologies enable us to measure more properties of things, and to collect and disseminate more data, there's still a need to find the best way to turn the data into stories that everyone wants to hear," he said. "The technologies are a tool, not an end in themselves."

Used creatively, however, those technologies can enable archaeologists to tell stories that might otherwise have remained untold. The work of Professor Davidson and his students (particularly Dr June Ross) on the rock art of the Selwyn Ranges, south-east of Mount Isa in Queensland, was enhanced through the development (by another of those students – Dr Malcolm Ridges) of a geographic information system that revealed complex social and cultural patterns linking art sites spread over an area of 150 square kilometres.

With the help of such technologies, Professor Davidson said, stories can be told about the interaction of fluctuating human populations and changing climate patterns over the past 40,000 years – stories that could provide illuminating perspectives on the current combination of climate change and massive population growth.

In making the point that our "archaeological past" lives in and around us he quoted from a poem by Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker) that begins: "Let no one say the past is dead / The past is all about us and within."

The annual general meeting that followed the symposium marked the end of Professor Davidson's two-year term as the Academy's Convener of Prehistory and Archaeology. The meeting also saw the election of a UNE archaeology graduate – Dr Sue O'Connor – as a Fellow of the Academy. Dr O'Connor, who is now the Head of the Department of Archaeology and Natural History in the Australian National University's Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, is the first person with a Bachelor's degree from the Department of Archaeology at UNE to be elected to Fellowship of the Academy. Last year Dr Mike Smith, who was the first person to graduate from UNE's Department of Archaeology with a PhD degree, was elected to Fellowship. Dr Smith is a Senior Research Fellow at the National Museum of Australia.

THE PHOTOGRAPH of rock art in the Dampier Archipelago displayed here expands to include UNE PhD student Ken Mulvaney (holder of a rock art research scholarship funded by Woodside Energy Ltd) and Trinidad Martinez (a UNE Visiting Fellow from the University of Valencia in Spain).

Posted by Jim Scanlan at November 22, 2007 12:22 PM