Map of Australia showing the extent of the continental shelf that was exposed during low sea level. Image credit: Patrick Nunn / Nicholas Reid, from the article “Aboriginal Memories of Inundation of the Australian Coast Dating from More than 7000 Years Ago.”
When the British began violently colonizing Australia in 1788, they encountered Australian Aboriginal groups that told of a time when the former coastline of mainland Australia was completely different. Aboriginal people described areas that were underwater and covered by the ocean as having once been dry with trees and animals. An 1859 report produced for the government by colonists described an Aboriginal man recalling when the bay was dry. The author of that report wrote that he pointed to the sea, telling him, “Plenty catch kangaroo and plenty catch opossum there.”
It took until 2015 to scientifically prove that Aboriginal people were correct. 10,000 years ago, ice sheets and glaciers held a huge amount of the world’s water. The earth was emerging from an ice age at that point and, as ice melted, sea levels rose by 200 to 330 feet. To get an idea of how much sea level rise that is, your average home is 20 to 25 feet tall, so it would look like 30 homes stacked on top of each other. For a modern analogy, you can compare this number to sea level rise in New York City, where the sea has risen by about 12 inches since 1900 and is projected to continue to increase as much as 2.5 to 6.5 feet by 2100. Some New York City neighborhoods could be underwater by then, in less than 80 years. That is only with a maximum of 6.5 feet in sea level rise, say nothing about the 300+ feet that aboriginal Australians experienced.
As sea levels rose, thousands of acres of land were completely lost–800,000 acres by some estimates. Whole communities had to relocate and renegotiate land and boundaries all across Australia. There are documented stories today from 21 locations from every part of the coastline. Tribes can still point to islands that no longer exist and provide their original names, as well as sacred entities that still live there.
As the sea level slowly crept up, generation after generation of Australians had to have observed it doing so and passed down this knowledge. All of this happened before the written word, and so this story was relayed through oral storytelling. Before the 2015 study, researchers figured that oral storytelling could persist for maybe 800 years at most. This rise in sea level occurred more than 7,000 to 13,000 years ago. So, storytelling can persist for much longer, in this case 10 thousand years, or roughly 300 generations.
Imagine knowing a place that well. Imagine your grandparents, aunts, and uncles all surrounding you, sharing stories about the natural world, that you then pass down to your children and their cousins, and then to your grandchildren and their cousins, who you also live with. By the time you’re gone, the story keeps moving. It’s hard to imagine in today’s world.
Today, climate change is causing the natural environment to change at breakneck speed–so quickly that now it won’t take thousands of years for us to pass down stories of change. As I watch these changes, I’ve been thinking a lot about this story from Aboriginal Australia. It offers us some lessons for a modern era when we are experiencing floods, hotter summers, wildfire smoke, and a spike in tick-borne diseases.
I find it helpful to remember that people before us have experienced massive and scary changes to their environments. In response, they told stories and shared knowledge. They continued to observe the land and connect to nature. In modern times, we can do the same; we can pay attention to the world around us and commit to constantly learning. Learn what species are native and invasive, learn the history of the landscape you live in, and learn what native people lived there. And tell stories to keep the memory alive of what things used to be like as we move forward into the uncertainty of climate change.