Australian Aboriginal Traditions of volcanism: Ancient recollections of eruptions and their nature, purpose, and contemporary importance.

Leigh Franks ORCID 0000-0003-1817-9769

Patrick D Nunn ORCID 0000-0002-3718-614X

Adrian McCallum ORCID 0000-0001-9295-5741

 

Abstract 

 

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.