How Long Have We Been Here?

Billy Griffiths, author of Deep Time Dreaming, is a historian who has spent years thinking about what it means to inhabit a continent where people have lived for at least 60,000 years — and how rarely that depth of time sits at the centre of how most Australians understand this country.

This conversation covers how Australian archaeology went from a chaotic, under-resourced field to something more careful and collaborative — and why it took so long for ancient Australia to be taken seriously. Billy unpacks what "at least 60,000 years" actually means: what the evidence looks like, where it's contested, and what uncertainty still sits behind the number.

The unanswered questions are also here: the sea crossings, the routes taken, the societies that emerged, and why phrases like "Aboriginal culture" can hide more than they reveal — alongside how imagination helps and misleads when thinking about people tens of thousands of years ago, and what new partnerships with Indigenous knowledge holders might still change the story.