Our modern understanding of the appearance of the Australian land mass is quite different to how the ancestors of the many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island nations have seen continental Australia in the past.  The Australian coast took the shape we know today around 8,000 years ago. Before then, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples lived on land that is now covered by sea.

At one point there would have been dry land stretching out 160 kilometres from the current shoreline. That land would have been owned and lived on by generations of Aboriginal people. Our discovery demonstrates that underwater archaeological material has survived sea-level rise.

—Chelsea Wiseman, Deep History of Sea Country Project

Aside from reading the underwater cultural landscape, there are change markers in the natural environment, like corals, which can grow slowly for thousands of years. Coral core samples can reveal the age of the coral bed and the impacts of river systems flowing into the ocean and sea level rise. Each growth layer of a coral tells a story, similar to the way each ring in an old-growth forest tree reveals changes in its environment.