01/09/2026
One photograph. Two landscapes. Twenty thousand years apart. Today we see sheltered water, rocky islands and the Southern Ocean. But during the Last Glacial Maximum, sea level around Australia was approximately 120 metres lower. Much of the water in this photograph would have been dry land. Today’s islands may have risen as granite hills across an exposed coastal landscape, with the shoreline much farther away. Aboriginal people had already been living across this continent for tens of thousands of years. As the ice melted and the sea rose, coastlines moved inland—submerging pathways, gathering places and cultural landscapes that may still survive beneath the water. That is why archaeologists do not see the coastline as a fixed boundary. We ask what the landscape looked like, how people moved through it and what stories its modern form may conceal. The sea changed the view. It did not erase the story.
