While Indigenous people know that they have always been on country in Australia, archaeological and genetics research since 2017 supports a new, albeit fragile, consensus that dates Indigenous habitation up to 65,000 years ago. The past decade has also witnessed a surge of public works by Indigenous creatives who are developing innovative aesthetic modes and forms to give imaginative expression to the deep past. Despite the centrality of ancestral memory in these works, Indigenous remembrance of the deep past remains marginalised in memory studies and historiography, fields originating in Europe and focused on the recent past. Emerging from collaborative research, and bringing together insights from deep history, Indigenous knowledges, and cultural memory, this lecture introduces and develops the concept of the deep present to explore the ways in which selected Indigenous artworks activate the deep past in the present. Based on analysis of selected Indigenous artworks spanning sculpture, literature, weaving, painting and installation, we show that the deep present provides a conceptual framework for rethinking concepts of temporality, transmission, sovereignty, ecology and decoloniality. In Australia, however, the deep present is grounded in an Indigenous conception of Country which encompasses human and more-than-human beings, and grounds Indigenous identity. While the Indigenous deep present travels offshore when artworks circulate internationally, we consider whether the concept of the deep present also travels – or whether the conditions from which it emerges are unique to Australia.
About the speaker
Rosanne Kennedy is an interdisciplinary Humanities scholar in Literary and Gender Studies at Australian National University. Working at the intersection of cultural memory studies, trauma studies, Indigenous studies, life writing, and human rights, her research explores mediations of testimony and memory in archives, trials, memoir, literature, film and visual arts in post-conflict and settler colonial contexts. She is the co-founder of the MemoryHub@ANU and Chair of the Advisory Board of the Memory Studies Association.
Her recent publications include a co-edited issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies on “Feminism, Memory, Activism” (2025), featuring her article titled, “Decolonial Memory Activism: Grandmothers Against Removals, After the Apology, and the Indigenous Struggle for Self-determination”.
At STIAS, she is working on a collaborative project that brings together deep history, memory studies, and Indigenous knowledges to explore memories of the deep past in Australia. She has held fellowships at Duke University Law School; Cambridge University; the Max Plank Centre for Excellence, Konstanz University; Utrecht University; and the University of London. She has supervised over 25 PhD students, has won University and College awards for postgraduate supervision and undergraduate teaching, and in 2026 will take up the position of Associate Dean Higher Degree Research at Australian National University.
