The idea that the kardimarkara tradition in the Lake Eyre region is a distant cultural memory of the remote past, of a time when the desert once teemed with life, was propelled into the public domain by JW Gregory in his 1906 book, The Dead Heart of Australia. This paper examines the historiography of the kardimarkara narratives, arguing that such use of Indigenous tradition needs to be subject to the same canons of scholarship and critical analysis as other historical records. The reading of kardimarkara as cultural memory is a misunderstanding of a typical ‘Dreaming’ narrative, in which kardimarkara represents the rainbow serpent, and where contemporary observations of fossil bones are used to validate this landesque ideology. This paper proposes a general framework for scrutinising and evaluating the historicity of oral tradition.

中文翻译：

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卡尔迪马克拉（Kardimarkara）史学：阅读沙漠传统作为遥远过去的文化记忆

JW格雷戈里（JW Gregory）在1906年的著作《死者之心》（The Dead Heart of ...）中将艾尔湖地区的kardimarkara传统视为遥远过去的遥远文化记忆，当时沙漠曾经充满生命。澳大利亚。本文研究了kardimarkara叙事的史学，认为对土著传统的这种使用需要与其他历史记录一样受到同样的学术和批判性分析。将kardimarkara读作文化记忆是对典型的“做梦”叙事的误解，其中kardimarkara代表彩虹蛇，而当代对化石骨骼的观察被用来验证这种地道意识形态。本文提出了一个审查和评估口述传统的历史性的总体框架。