Seafaring: Canoeing Ancient Songlines
Publisher: Magabala Books
Published: April 2023
Genre: Non-Fiction
Aboriginal Australians were master seafarers, master navigators, master astronomers – who possibly sailed as far as Hawaii. These are just some of Gumbaynggirr/Gamilaroi man Victor Briggs’ contentions which, once you’ve read his extraordinary book, feel neither bold nor unlikely but exactly right.
This slender yet impactful book, based on Briggs’ master’s thesis, is not a revisionist history of the way in which early Aboriginal Australians understood and moved about in the world. Rather, it is a long-overdue attempt to set the record straight in regard to First Nations’ mastery of the sea and the stars, and of their equally masterful relations with Australia’s neighbours.
“Aboriginal Australia has always extended into the Pacific, rather than being the isolated set of cultures that history and scholarship has made them out to be in the past,” writes Briggs.
His own voyage of discovery starts with a “story that was told to me by my uncle Tim” about “the relationships between Australian aboriginal people and Indigenous Hawaiians in the far distant past.”
What follows is a thorough investigation into the primacy of dreams and stories as vehicles for deep knowledge, canoe technology, trade relations in Oceania, astronomy and navigation and religion and culture.
And a voyage of self-discovery: “After discovering certain facts about the truth of Indigenous seafaring feats, I found myself changing a lot. When I say changing, I mean culturally, as an Aboriginal person.”
Take the trip with this remarkable book, written with passion and authority, and you’ll find yourself a changed person as well.