Australian Academy of the Humanities 2020 Crawford Award winner – Billy Griffiths

2020 Crawford Medal winner shapes our understanding of Australia’s historic past and present

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Award winning Australian writer and historian, Dr Billy Griffiths – whose latest book Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia (2018) has been described as ‘the freshest, most important book about our past in years’ – is the recipient of the Australian Academy of the Humanities’ 2020 Max Crawford Medal.

The Medal is Australia’s most prestigious award for achievement and promise in the humanities, and it is awarded to an Australia-based, early-career scholar for outstanding achievement.

Dr Griffiths is a lecturer in Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Melbourne’s Deakin University. His research focusses on cultural heritage, Indigenous history, political history, archaeology and seascapes.

The award of the Crawford Medal recognises his outstanding ability to bridge the disciplines of history, literature and archaeology, and the imaginative considerations he gives to the intersections of the sciences and the humanities through his work.
Dr Griffiths’ multi-awarding winning and widely-acclaimed book, Deep Time Dreaming, was the result of extensive fieldwork and archival research.

In his nomination for the Crawford Medal, eminent historian and Academy Fellow and former Academy President, Iain McCalman AO, said ‘I have encountered no other young academic in my university career of more than 50 years whose book (Deep Time Dreaming) has made a larger or deeper impact… (it is) one of handful of publications that have shifted Australia’s understanding of the past: both Indigenous and non-Indigenous.
‘While telling for the first time the gripping story of the women and men who have made the key discoveries which shaped the modern discipline of archaeology in Australia, Billy never fails to demonstrate and acknowledge their debt to the contributions of the Aboriginal peoples whose cultures were being uncovered,’ Professor McCalman said.

Dr Griffiths experienced his first archaeological dig at the Madjedbebe rock shelter in Kakadu, where, using new techniques, archaeologists dramatically enlarged the timescale of Australian history, dating the Indigenous history of human habitation back at least 65,000 years.
Dr Griffiths’ work has also been acclaimed by Tjanara Goreng Goreng, research scholar at the Australian National University’s Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research and traditional owner from Wakka Wakka Wulli Wulli in Central Queensland. ‘I describe it as a gift to Australia, and to me, and to First Nations peoples.’