Derek John Mulvaney

Aboriginal man and environment in Australia

Man came to Australia well before the end of the Pleistocene epoch - the so-called Ice Age. To understand his history, then, both early and later, calls for an understanding of climate and environment, and the changes that have taken place in them. Early man in Australia was a stone-using huntergatherer, and the traditional Aboriginal economy and society have persisted into modern times, so a wealth of ethnographic information is available to help in understanding the way he reacted and so influenced the diversity of environments found in the Australian continent. Over the last ten years Australian archaeology has developed from a very new branch of an old-established discipline to one that has made and is making very significant contributions to the study of universal man, not just in Australia. This book is the outcome of a series of seminars by scholars in many fields who have brought to bear the skills of many disciplines in interpreting a vast array of challenging new information. It will appeal not only to scholars but to all who have an interest in the history of the Australian environment and the story of first human settlement.

The Australian Aborigines 1606–1929: Opinion and fieldwork

(1958). The Australian Aborigines 1606–1929: Opinion and fieldwork. Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand: Vol. 8, No. 30, pp. 131-151.

Prehistory from Antipodean Perspectives.

My initial Australian fieldwork was still a year ahead when, surprisingly, I featured anonymously on a verbal distribution map confidently sketched by the Disney Professor. I was the ‘Australia’ reference of his Inaugural lecture, thereby illustrating his proposition (Clark, 1954, 33), that ‘the geographical field of Cambridge prehistorians has been … the whole world’. My Cambridge contemporaries, Sieveking and Golson, respectively represented ‘Malaya’ and ‘New Zealand’. We were indeed the forerunners of a sizeable band of hunter-diggers which ventured into the Pacific world and which numbers Cambridge amongst its totemic centres. Such incipient, though benevolent imperialism, has not gone unchallenged. A participant in an Australian archaeological congress recently deplored what he judged to be the errors and dogmatism of the ‘Cambridge school’. He erred in affixing this label, because there is no such implicit cohesion within the ranks; diversity is already a healthy characteristic of Pacific research. What was relevant about Cambridge training, but no more so than of any sound methodological discipline, was that it encouraged respect for, and critical evaluation of, evidence. What was intellectually satisfying to the student were the concepts of universality and interdependence in past human affairs. Such is the message from Miles Burkitts Prehistory to Grahame Clarks World Prehistory .