ABSTRACT
Midnight, the Manning Bar, Sydney University, 4 November 2005. The stage is dark; a fi gure sits cross-legged on the fl oor, rubbing a stick between his hands. The audience waits, watching the steady, rhythmic movement. A trail of smoke, a red glow; he blows on a piece of bark and then leaps up waving the smouldering material in his hands. The glow turns to a fl ame. At some point in the evening I had been musing on the connections between this place, the Manning Bar, and the great Australian historian Manning Clark, who magisterially pronounced at the beginning of his A History of Australia that ‘Civilisation did not begin in Australia until the last quarter of the eighteenth century’ (Clark, 1962, p. 3). Of course, it wasn’t named after him – not even a historian of his status could have a bar named after his fi rst name – but the name and the fi rst line of his book resonate. Doubtless, ‘civilisation’ is meant here in a technical sense – the development of forms of farming and urban settlement with particular social hierarchies and divisions of labour – yet this emphasis on history as the story of civilizations while the rest is lumped into prehistory has always been a very particular vision of people and culture, discounting so many from participation in history. And this fi re burning in the darkness on the stage is representing a different history, a history that goes way back further than the arrival of Europeans and their insidious civilization on the shores of Australia, a history of languages, cultures and knowledges that developed over thousands of years on this arid land.
