One day today's students of the Australian National University's School of Archaeology and Anthropology will surely get to dig at some sites (in Egypt, perhaps, or at places once teeming with Visigoths or Vikings) that throb with promise.
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However, for the time being they are labouring in and around some some trenches dug on Springbank Island in Lake Burley Griffin. There is some promise there, but the island (which turns out to be surprisingly large, with room for perhaps 10 Aussie Rules football ovals) cannot be said to throb with it.
We joined archaeologists and their students and a small flock of media on the quaint vessel that took us out to the island, from Acton, on Tuesday morning. The pace of the dear old vessel was so sluggish that Black Swans, paddling, overtook us with ease, and laughed at us the way hoons in fast cars laugh at people in Barinas. The lake waters were, as usual, as dull as the surface of a cup of tea. And so we lost ourselves in fantasies of piracy, assisted by the fact that one of the passengers had a black eye patch (but no parrot on his shoulder).
However, things did become interesting once we reached Treasure, sorry, Springbank Island, where the project is being led by Dr Duncan Wright.
"Shiver me timbers!" I exclaimed as the students drew back tarpaulins to reveal three already substantial work-in-progress trenches.
The island was invented when Lake Burley Griffin filled in 1963. The powers-that-be wanted the lake to have a few token islands and so this knoll of land was augmented with lots of imported earth. The homestead of the Springbank property, the property marked out by Deputy Surveyor-General Robert Hoddle in 1832, once stood on this knoll. An inevitable yew tree (settlers always planted a yew) stands close to where the homestead was, although some of the homestead's actual site is now beneath an insensitively-sited shelter built for modern Canberrans who go to the island to gambol. The surviving yew is a clue to where the the homestead stood because it is present, then just a pup of a tree, in very old photographs of the homestead.
Other mainlanders sometimes seen on the island, it emerged from Monday's conversation, include kangaroos. They are, we sometimes forget, accomplished swimmers.
Other mainlanders there on Monday included, endearingly, a pair of the most sociable magpies you'd ever meet. They carolled during the talks given by the boyish project leader and by traditional custodian Matilda House, and ambled about among us. Perhaps, just as magpies materialise from nowhere when you're digging the garden, they'd come over as soon as they sensed the very big diggings going on out at Springbank.
Over their sing-song Dr Wright explained that last year he'd come out and used ground-penetrating radar that seemed to show some "anomalies" (for example perhaps a man-made ditch and some foundations of a building) well worth investigating. He knew from discussions with traditional custodians that the place had once been a big meeting place for Indigenous people. He had hopes that the diggings will find items of homestead and of Aboriginal significance. And it already had come to pass he rejoiced a little later when showing us these treasures, that they'd found a few fragments of 19th century ceramics and two tiny but exquisite stone-flake scrapers.
"That'd skin a possum," Matilda House thought, admiring the keen edge on one of the scrapers.
The three trenches were already substantial by the time work on them resumed on Monday. However, Dr Wright was looking forward to "quite an exciting day ahead of us". This was because a lot of the digging thus far had been to get down through what one of the students called "top junk". That junk included the muck brought from somewhere else in the 1960s to build up the island. But now, Dr Wright was rejoicing on Monday (the students by now on hands and knees at the bottoms of trenches painstakingly trowelling and sweeping, with above-ground students sifting through what had been dug up) they were beginning to find lots of charcoal, suggestive of human activity.
Of course the real work of real archaeology, like this Springbank Island version of it, is nothing like the find-a-treasure-every-minute of TV archaeology. And of course Springbank Island is nothing like the ancient Mesopotamia of the National Geographic Channel or the Merrie, medieval olde England of TV's Channel 4 Time Team (the latter presided over by Tony Robinson). A Time Team trench the size of the biggest, deepest trench on Springbank on Monday, dug in olde England would already have yielded a great deal, but on Springbank on Monday there seemed to be a lot of digging and sifting in vain. A lot of the dug out earth seemed wilfully characterless. It almost never yielding so much as a stone.
Indeed the work thus far (by late on Monday morning) had been so uneventful that everyone at the site was still talking about the find of a1960s-looking glass Vegemite jar. Dr Wright had given it its own, individual specimen package, as if the Vegemite might once have belonged to Visigoths or Vikings.
"Anything coming through?" supervisor Iain Johnston, an archaeology PhD student, asked two industrious, earth-stained female student sievers.
"No, dammit," one reported.
The week is young though, and by Saturday, when there will be an Open Day at the island (the two sociable magpies are really looking forward to that) there may have been discoveries of truly old, pre-Vegemite artefacts galore.
