That Rewrite Human History
— and why they’re trying to hide them
“Most of what you were taught about this continent was simply too small.”
In 1961 the earliest secure human occupation of this continent stood at 9,000 years. By 1990 it was around 40,000. In 2017 a team publishing in Nature put the lowest artefact-bearing layer at Madjedbebe at 65,000 ± 5,700. In one working lifetime the number was multiplied by seven.
This is the register of the two hundred places that did it — every date sourced, every dispute stated. And then Part Seven names what is being removed, under which Act, and who signed the consent.
“I bought it for the Juukan Gorge chapter and stayed for the register. Site 072 — Budj Bim — finally explained why 6,600 years is the number that matters, and not the one you hear on television.”
Raymond K.61, Adelaide SA
“The page called How to Read an Entry is the reason I trust the other 194. Every age arrives with the method that produced it, and where the specialists disagree the book says so instead of picking a winner.”
Meredith L.64, Ballarat VIC
“Part Seven is the part I did not expect. It names the Act, the section, and the date of the consent. I have sent the Murujuga pages to three people this month.”
Tom B.63, Cairns QLD
In 1788 the British arrived at Port Jackson carrying a theory: that the people already here had no history. No agriculture, no architecture, no engineering, no astronomy, no record of the past. The land was declared, in law, to belong to no one. That legal fiction survived in Australian courts until 1992.
The archaeological record has been dismantling the theory ever since, one site at a time, and it has not been gentle about it. What follows is not a theory of my own. It is a register of what has already been published, dug, dated, peer-reviewed, argued over and in several cases legally destroyed.
At Budj Bim in western Victoria the Gunditjmara cut channels through basalt to divert water, and built weirs, dams and holding ponds to trap and farm short-finned eel. UNESCO’s inscription puts the system at a minimum of 6,600 years — older than Giza, older than Stonehenge, and functioning continuously into the colonial period. It was listed in 2019 as the first Australian property inscribed on World Heritage for Aboriginal cultural values alone.
The same landscape holds the remains of hundreds of stone-walled houses. Terra nullius had a technical requirement: to hold that land belonged to nobody, English law needed the people on it to be using it in a way the law did not recognise as use. Cultivation and fixed building were exactly the disqualifying facts. They were there the whole time.
Along more than twenty separate stretches of the Australian coast, Aboriginal oral traditions describe country now under the sea — and describe it in terms consistent with shorelines drowned between roughly 7,000 and 12,000 years ago. Whatever mechanism preserved that information, it worked across something like three hundred generations of transmission. Part Six examines the claim narrowly, because it is the part of the subject most often ruined by enthusiasm.
There is one. It does not look the way the genre usually draws it. On 24 May 2020 Rio Tinto detonated explosives at Juukan Gorge in the Pilbara and destroyed two rockshelters occupied for approximately 46,000 years — a site that had yielded a 4,000-year-old plaited human-hair belt genetically matched to living Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people.
The destruction was legal. Ministerial consent had been granted under Section 18 of Western Australia’s Aboriginal Heritage Act 1972 — in 2013, seven years before the blast, and one year before excavation revealed how old and how rich the site actually was. Under the Act as it stood there was no mechanism to revisit a consent once granted, however much new information emerged. The Traditional Owners had no right of appeal, and their own agreement with the company contained provisions preventing them from objecting publicly.
That is the shape of the thing. Not a conspiracy. A permit system. Western Australia passed a replacement heritage act in 2021, brought it into force on 1 July 2023, and repealed it approximately five weeks later — reinstating the 1972 legislation that had permitted Juukan Gorge in the first place.
There is a whole shelf of books about ancient Australia that will tell you Egyptians built it. This is not one of them, and the distinction is the entire product.
| The usual “lost civilisation” book | 200 Ancient Sites in Australia | |
|---|---|---|
| Where the dates come from | A documentary, a forum thread, another book that cited a documentary. | Peer-reviewed archaeology, UNESCO World Heritage documentation, Commonwealth and State legislation, Hansard, and the report of the Joint Standing Committee on Northern Australia. Key sources listed from page 195. |
| When specialists disagree | The convenient number is printed. The argument is not mentioned. | The dispute is stated rather than resolved, uncertainty included. “65,000 ± 5,700” is not the same claim as “65,000”, and the difference is not pedantry. |
| Who built it | Egyptians. Phoenicians. A vanished race. Visitors from elsewhere. | The people who built these places are still here, and their descendants can take you to them. Page 173 sets out why the alternative fails as archaeology — and why the identical argument was used in North America for a century to justify taking land. |
| The illustrations | Rock art, ceremonial designs and ancestral remains reproduced because they were findable. | Not one photograph, drawing or tracing of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander art, design or ceremonial material appears anywhere in the book — a deliberate editorial decision under Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property protocols, explained in full on page 5. The illustrations are survey drawings: plans, sections, chronological bars and locator maps. |
| The cover-up | A secret vault. A suppressed dig. Academics in a conspiracy. | Section 18 consents that cannot be revisited. Commercial-in-confidence excavation reports that no researcher may open. A replacement Act repealed five weeks after it commenced. All of it public, all of it dated, none of it secret — which is why it works. |
| What you can check | Nothing. That is the design. | Every site numbered 001 to 200, with Country, location, published age, dating method and current legal status. An alphabetical index of all two hundred from page 187. |
Two hundred pages. Seven parts, grouped by the kind of assumption each site broke. This is the real table of contents.
Sites that moved the date.
Art, burial and symbolic thought.
Aquaculture, quarries, architecture and the food system.
Astronomy, alignment and the recording of the sky.
The coastlines that are now underwater.
Oral tradition functioning as durable data.
The permits, the gag clauses and the filing cabinets.
Loving Wallaby is a small publishing project about the Australian continent and its deep past, published under the Deep Country Press imprint. This is Volume I of the field record.
Every date, measurement, legal instrument and named event in the book is drawn from published sources: peer-reviewed archaeological literature, UNESCO World Heritage documentation, Australian Commonwealth and State legislation, Hansard, the report of the Joint Standing Committee on Northern Australia, and mainstream news reporting. Key sources are listed from page 195.
The maps, sections, plans, charts and chronological bars are original works prepared for this edition, drawn from published measurements and using the neutral conventions of archaeological survey. There is no Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander art, design, ceremonial object or restricted cultural material anywhere in the volume — the right to reproduce that material rests with the communities who hold it, and it is not an author’s to give away.
The publisher acknowledges the Traditional Owners and Custodians of the lands and waters described in these pages, and pays respect to Elders past and present. Sovereignty over these places was never ceded. The sites catalogued here are not ruins and they are not abandoned. They belong to living nations with continuing law, continuing obligations, and continuing authority over what may be said about them.
No, and it argues against that genre directly. A recurring claim in popular writing about ancient Australia is that these sites were built by someone else — Egyptians, Phoenicians, a vanished race, visitors from elsewhere. Chapter 4 of Part Seven, from page 173, sets out why those claims fail on the evidence and why their history is uglier than most readers realise: the identical argument was used in North America for a century to justify taking land from people said to be incapable of building what stood on it.
When you tell a reader that somebody else built Budj Bim, you are telling them the Gunditjmara did not. The truth is more remarkable than the invention.
Because every one of them comes with the method that produced it and the uncertainty attached to it, and the sources are listed from page 195. Ages are given in years before present with the technique named — OSL, radiocarbon, uranium-series — and a short guide to what each method can and cannot establish appears on page 15.
Where a date is contested at its margin, the book says so. Several senior archaeologists accept 60,000 years for Madjedbebe while questioning 65,000. That disagreement is printed. Nobody serious now argues for 40,000, and that is printed too.
Because it is on the internet in two hundred separate places, most of them behind a journal paywall, a UNESCO nomination file, a State heritage register, or a Senate committee transcript — and none of them formatted so you can compare one site against another.
What you are buying is the assembly: two hundred sites in one register, every entry in the same six fields, so that comparing Madjedbebe with Budj Bim with Wurdi Youang takes a minute instead of a fortnight. Plus a legal chapter that pulls the Act, the section, the consent date and the inquiry finding into one narrative.
Because it is a digital download with no printing, no shipping and no distributor taking a cut, and because the point of the book is to be read rather than admired. The pricing is deliberate: this is the launch price of the first edition, and it is the same file whether one person buys it or ten thousand do.
A 200-page illustrated PDF, delivered instantly by Gumroad after checkout. It reads on a computer, a tablet, a phone or an e-reader, and it prints cleanly if you want it on paper. There is no app, no subscription and no account to maintain — the download link is yours and the file is yours to keep.
There is one volume today — this one, A Field Record · Volume I, first edition 2026 — and it is sold whole. All seven parts and all two hundred sites come in the single file at $9.99. It is not split into chapters and there is nothing else to add to your basket.
Deliberately not. Not one photograph, drawing, tracing or reproduction of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander rock art, design, ceremonial object or restricted cultural material appears anywhere in it. That decision is explained in full on page 5. A great deal of that material is restricted by law — gendered, initiated, or closed to outsiders altogether — and the right to reproduce it rests with the communities who hold it.
The illustrations do the other job instead: plans, sections, chronological bars, contour lines and locator maps — the survey drawings that show you where a place is, how deep it goes, what came out of it, and when.
No — and please don’t. This is not a guidebook. Many of the places described are on private land, on Aboriginal freehold, under permit, or closed to visitors entirely. Where an exact position would expose a place to harm, or where custodians have asked that it not be circulated, the entry gives a region instead and the locator map is generalised to match. The chapter beginning on page 197 covers access, and the places you should not go.
The whole field record — seven parts, two hundred sites, one file.
Two hundred sites. Every date sourced.
The complete 200-page field record — seven parts, an index of all two hundred sites, and the legal chapter on what is being removed and under which Act.
Get The Book — $27 $9.99