This Roundtable brings together key researchers who shaped the seven-year ARC Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Program ‘Rediscovering the Deep Human Past: Global Networks, Future Opportunities’ at the Research Centre for Deep History led by Professor Ann McGrath AM. Defying our interest in critiquing boundary-enforcing periodisations, this gathering will track where we are at this very specific ‘end-time’. Where have we journeyed, intellectually and physically? What new directions might be mapped out for the future? If indeed, deep history has a future…
One of the motivations behind ‘deep history’ was to expand the scale and scope of Australian history – and to shift the historical practice of relegating Indigenous people globally as history’s outsiders. We hoped such a term would help break the ‘discovery barrier’ and ‘first settlement barrier’, around which the chronologies of Australian and many settler/colonial histories have been organised.
In order to honour the expansive approaches of Indigenous temporalities that include the notion of ‘everywhen’ and the ever-present, we needed to broaden the notion of ‘deep history’ beyond the fixity of western-style chronology. Collaborations with Indigenous communities led us to explore themes such as language, ceremony, rock art and walking on Country.

Professor Jackie Huggins AM FAHA is a Bidjara/Birri Gubba Juru woman and professor at the University of Queensland. 

Dr Amy Way was a postdoctoral Fellow with the Research Centre for Deep History and is now a Lecturer in Modern History at Griffith University.

Dr Ben Silverstein is a Lecturer in Indigenous Studies at ANU and was a postdoctoral Fellow with the Research Centre for Deep History. 

Dr Beth Marsden is a post-doctoral fellow at the RCDH, specialising in Aboriginal history, history of education and childhood, and critical archival studies. She will take up a post-doctoral position at the University of Melbourne in April 2025.

Dr Mike Jones was a Postdoctoral Fellow at RCDH, and is now a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Tasmania Indigenous and Colonial Histories in the School of Humanities, College of Arts, Law and Education. 

Dr Laura Rademaker was a Postdoctoral Fellow and Deputy Director at the RCDH and now holds an ARC DECRA.

Chairs/Commentators

Professor Ann McGrath is the Director of the Research Centre for Deep History at the Australian National University. She holds the WK Hancock Distinguished Chair of History at the Australian National University and was awarded the Kathleen Fitzpatrick ARC Laureate Fellowship in 2017. 

Professor Lynette Russell AM is Sir John Monash Distinguished Professor at Monash University, and an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow. She is Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Indigenous and Environmental Histories and Futures.