Human occupation of Australia dates back to at least 65,000 years. Aboriginal ontologies incorporate deep memories of this past, at times accompanied by a conviction that Aboriginal people have always been there. This poses a problem for historians and archaeologists: how to construct meaningful histories that extend across such a long duration of space and time. While earlier generations of scholars interpreted pre-colonial Aboriginal history as static and unchanging, marked by isolation and cultural conservatism, recent historical scholarship presents Australia's deep past as dynamic and often at the cutting-edge of human technological innovation. This historiographical shift places Aboriginal people at the centre of pre-colonial history by incorporating Aboriginal oral histories and material culture, as well as ethnographic and anthropological accounts. This review considers some of the debates within this expansive and expanding field, focusing in particular on questions relating to Aboriginal agriculture and land management and connections between Aboriginal communities and their Southeast Asian neighbours. At the same time, the study of Australia's deep past has become a venue for confronting colonial legacies, while also providing a new disciplinary approach to the question of reconciliation and the future of Aboriginal sovereignty in Australia.

人类对澳大利亚的占领至少可以追溯到 65,000 年前。原住民本体包含对过去的深刻记忆，有时伴随着原住民一直在那里的信念。这给历史学家和考古学家带来了一个问题：如何构建跨越如此长时空的有意义的历史。虽然前几代学者将前殖民时期的原住民历史解释为静态和不变的，以孤立和文化保守主义为标志，但最近的历史研究将澳大利亚的悠久历史描述为充满活力的，而且往往处于人类技术创新的前沿。这种史学上的转变通过融合土著口述历史和物质文化，将土著人置于前殖民历史的中心，以及民族志和人类学帐户。本综述考虑了这一广阔和不断扩大的领域内的一些辩论，特别关注与土著农业和土地管理以及土著社区与其东南亚邻居之间的联系相关的问题。与此同时，对澳大利亚悠久历史的研究已成为对抗殖民遗产的场所，同时也为解决澳大利亚原住民主权的和解问题和未来提供了新的学科方法。