![]() The story describes several named landmarks with remembered historical-cultural associations that are now underwater. One version of the story collected from the Yidindji people of the Cairns area recalls a time when Fitzroy Island was part of the mainland and offshore Green Island was four times larger. Several decades ago, linguists working with Aboriginal groups along the Queensland coastal margin recorded stories about a time when the ancestors of these people lived at the coast “where the Great Barrier Reef now stands”. Could they have reached us from 13,000 years ago? Tracing tales These dates give us a ballpark for how old stories of flooding may be. ![]() One thousand years later, it had risen to about 50 metres below present. Water poured into the world’s oceans, raising their levels in ways that are now well understood.īy about 13,000 years ago, sea level had risen to around 70 metres below its present level. When the last ice age began to end, a few thousand years later, huge masses of ice that had built up on the land, particularly in the northern hemisphere, began melting. The end of the ice agesĪround Australia, we know that at the coldest time of the last ice age about 20,000 years ago, sea level stood about 120 metres below its present level. We argue that these stories (and probably many others) recall coastal inundation as sea levels reached their present level at least 6,000-7,000 years ago. In a recent paper we presented at an indigenous language conference in Japan, we analysed 18 stories from around Australia’s coast. Along the south coast, stories written down early in colonial times told when these areas were dry, a time when people hunted kangaroo and emu there, before the water rose and flooded them, never again to recede. So goes an Aboriginal story, paraphrased, about the origin of the Wellesley Islands in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria, a story with parallels along every part of the coast of Australia. Then Garnguur, the seagull woman, took her raft and dragged it back and forth across the neck of the peninsula letting the sea pour in and making our homes into islands. ![]() They were part of a peninsula that jutted out from the mainland and we roamed freely throughout the land without having to get in a boat like we do today. In the beginning, as far back as we remember, our home islands were not islands at all as they are today.
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