Cirrus@Austlit

'This volume represents a brilliant fusion of Traditional Knowledge, origin narratives, Western science and contemporary art. It is based on ‘deep-time’ complex human–landscape relationships from a highly significant lake system known as Paruku in the south-east Kimberley region. Known on cartographic charts as Lake Gregory, it is the only co-ordinated drainage system that flows from the east Kimberley into the expansive linear dune fields of the Great Sandy Desert. The lake was once a mega-lake, many times its current size, reflecting massive monsoonal rains more akin to central Indonesia than the present Kimberley desert edge. It hosted an enhanced aquatic and avian fauna and was likely a highly attractive lake for early settlers — being surrounded by savannah woodlands and grasses with grazing terrestrial fauna. Indeed, it was at such major water bodies that peoples transitioned into the desert hunter gatherer adaptations we think of today as the ethnographic norm. They persisted in an increasingly arid landscape — with lakes as a chain of connection to previous pluvial states.' (Introduction)