AustLit

'Everywhen consists of twelve essays and an introduction by the book’s three editors, a Ngarigu linguist and two non-Indigenous historians of colonialism. The book’s title comes from an influential 1956 essay by W.E.H. Stanner on Indigenous views of time, and the essays originated from a 2018 symposium at the ANU on ‘Understanding the Deep Past across Languages and Culture’. The book aims, as the editors write, ‘to explore how Indigenous temporalities can offer alternative perspectives toward understanding the concept of time, a factor so central to the historian’s craft yet so often taken for granted’ (2).' (Introduction)

'It can take an enormous intellectual effort for non-Indigenous people (such as this reviewer) to grasp Indigenous concepts of time. This is partially due to what Aileen Moreton-Robinson has described as the incommensurability of Indigenous and Western epistemological approaches. In settler-colonial terms, land is a resource to be appropriated, surveyed, and exploited. Temporality is generally used to situate the colonisation event, the before and after, from a perspective where time is linear and forward-looking. By contrast, in Indigenous cosmological approaches, land, culture, and time are co-dependent and in perpetual conversation. Country and time are indivisible.' (Introduction)

'When the eminent Australian anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner first published his essay on “The Dreaming” in 1956, there was increasing scholarly and popular interest in the complexity and duration of Australia’s Indigenous cultures.' (Introduction)