This article is available for free to read online; just search for it:
Laura Rademaker. “60,000 Years is not forever: ‘time revolutions’ and Indigenous pasts.” Postcolonial Studies. September 2021.
But if you were specifically interested in reading more about songspirals and Aboriginal conceptions of time, better to read the words of the Yolngu women themselves. The article here references their 2019/2020 book:
Song Spirals: Sharing Women’s Wisdom of Country through Songlines.
The book was written by the Gay’wu Group of Women and discusses time/temporality and human relationships with other-than-human creatures from a Yolngu perspective.
If you cannot find the book, that’s OK, because Yolngu women and scholars put together a couple of articles describing the same subjects, which you can read online. I recommend:
“Gathering of the Clouds: Attending to Indigenous understandings of time and climate through songspirals.” Authored by Bawaka Country including, S. Wright, S. Suchet-Pearson, K. Lloyd, L. Burarrwanga, R. Ganambarr, M. Ganambarr-Stubbs, B. Ganambarr, D. Maymuru. Published in the journal Geoforum in January 2020.
Down below, I’ve included an excerpt from their article.
But first, here’s a short re-post of an excerpt from the Rademaker article, for comparison/contrast or whatever:
Aboriginal people, in many cases, have resisted and rejected the uniformity of times that are celebrated by the supposed ‘time revolutions’ and instead, pointed to their own dynamic and enduring temporalities. […] By the nineteenth century, however, ‘secular time’ became for many ‘just time, period’: the ‘empty time’ of Walter Benjamin. […] The European discovery of ‘deep time’ hastened this shift. As Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it, in the ‘modern historical consciousness’ ‘time is empty because it acts as a bottomless sack: any number of events can be put inside it’. […] Historicism views the past as developments, trends, eras and epochs. It assumes a homogenous, calendrical time through which a universal story of all peoples (no matter their cosmology or temporality) might be told. […]
Many of the Traditional Owners of Willandra Lakes expressed frustration that their temporalities were overlooked by researchers. Datings of tens of thousands of years were not ‘revolutionary’ for those who know they had ‘always’ been here. McGrath describes how, to Traditional Owners, Mungo Lady is not ‘“gone” in any final sense; she is active in the landscape today’. ‘This lady who lived 40,000 years ago,’ she observes, ‘is treated like an aunty who died only yesterday’. For Traditional Owners, the scientists’ ‘obsession’ with dates is a source of frustration. These tensions are more than disputes over time’s scale, questions of 40,000 years versus ‘infinity’. Rather, they reflect a deeper mismatch between linear, homogenous, quantifiable time and many Aboriginal people’s often unacknowledged temporalities. For Indigenous peoples, time is not necessarily homogenous or universal container for events. It can be ‘plural’. […]
For many Australian Aboriginal people, time is neither exclusively linear nor cyclical, it can be always, everywhen. Australian Indigenous embodied practices for knowing, remembering and re-enacting the past in the present blur the distinctions of linear time, making all time ‘now’. […] Riratjingu elder, Wandjuk Marika, for example, explained that while ‘scientists can give you a small story of our origins possibly 40,000 years ago’, Aboriginal people ‘can tell you many more’. As Nganyinytia Ilyatjari explains, ‘Tjukurpa iriti ngaringi munu kuwari wanka nyinyangi.’ That is, ‘Tjukurpa [often translated “Dreaming”] has existed from a long time ago and is alive today.’ The power and presence of the Creative Beings continue to work in the landscape and creatures they formed. The Burarrwana collective of Yolngu women writes that ‘songspirals’ (often called ‘songlines’ or ‘Dreamings’) ‘have been here a long time’. But they did not simply create the land, ‘they keep on creating it, and us’. They are ‘ancient but fresh’ and ‘always in emergence’. The women are emphatic that time is not simply linear ‘clock time’. Times are interwoven and interconnected. Time is co-existing. We are with them. They are in their time. You are in your time. We are in time together. […] Aboriginal temporalities might weave together what, from a white settler perspective, might be temporally distant events. In Yolngu cosmologies, the closeness of events is determined more by their location, power and significance than their temporal distance. […] Yet the dominating times of settler colonialism erase the possibility of these temporalities. That is, they deny Indigenous ‘temporal sovereignty’. Under settler-colonialism, settler time is set as ‘the baseline for the unfolding of time itself’; as if white settlers’ times were the only times. So Indigenous claims become inconceivable and unrecognizable, being grounded in different experiences of time.
Now, an excerpt from the Yolngu collective’s “Gathering of the Clouds …”:
Ada Smailbegovic talks of starfish time (2015). Starfish may seem to be still, but longer attention, through time-lapse photography for example, shows them moving, changing. Smailbegovic also talks of larval time, the time it takes for eggs to develop and hatch, a time that is a compound entity of other variables, longer in the cold, or sped up with increasing temperature. Larval time is the right time for eggs to hatch, a deeply relational and contingent time. As she points out, “many of the temporalities that are relevant for developing a politics of time in the Anthropocene – such as minute and incrementally accumulating processes of change, or the long duration of geological time, rock time, or the temporal rhythms of non-human organisms – are beyond the human sensorium” (2015: 97). For by attending to more-than-human agencies of time and weather, diverse multiplicities emerge even as they are beyond human understanding. This is the seasonal time of clouds gathering. It is also the time of hydrological cycles, of water moving through aquifers for thousands of years, of transpiration and growth. And short spirals, of the flash of lightning, claps of thunder, of traveling sound and light. Then there are beings that experience hundreds, thousands of generations within a human lifetime. For such beings, the memories, learnings and modes of passing on experience are, it almost goes without saying (yet it must be said as it is so often not), radically different from any human’s in terms of the ways they experience change. The immensity of the alterity is, literally, incomprehensible to humans. We can’t know how and what these beings know. But we can be aware that they have knowledges and experiences beyond us. For many people, coming from different cultural and ontological positions, not knowing does not mean not connecting or not respecting. For it would seem that there are things that humans cannot and should not know. We don’t need to know what starfish know. But we should know they live and experience and think beyond us. We should seek respect and be aware of how our lives are entangled, how we co-become. […] These are place-based, pluralist, more-than-Western/colonial/white, more-than-human co-becomings. Weather - the sun, the clouds, the clans that gather, the starfish as it moves and the eggs as they develop and hatch - tell us that time does not exist separately from more-than-human relationships and more-than-human worlds. It does not order worlds in a strict and linear, universalized sequence. It is not abstract, or empty. It is not separate from humans. This is a “transcorporeal collaboration” […] that make and weather a season’s change, a collaboration within which bodies are not discrete entities whose borders may stand or be breached, but are themselves always more than human.
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