The Mutability of Time and Space as a Means of Healing History in an Australian Aboriginal Community

He imagines Ireland’s peat bogs to be a timeless, bottomless land that has forever been camped on. For Heaney, these bogs are as deep and mysterious as the ancient Irish whose archaeological relics are uncovered by modern-day peat miners who strip away the layers. Of course, we know Ireland’s peat bogs are neither timeless nor bottomless. Scientists have shown that they are relatively recent landscape features. But we also know Heaney’s imagined bogland is poetic country. In this country, time and space are allowed to be used and changed to tell us a story about people and their profound attachment to their homeland. But most of us live in different countries from poets. In the academy, or at least in the historic disciplines in which many of us operate, we are not as flexible as poets with time or space. Most of us perceive time as linear, moving from the past to the present in a straight line, with events occurring in a roughly ordered fashion relative to one another in time and space. This suits most of us. It is how we lead our lives and how we structure our stories about the past.3 But for scholars engaged with Aboriginal histories, the architecture of linear history, while sometimes a useful tool, is perhaps just as deeply imaginary as Seamus Heaney’s poetic country.