Beneath the living coral of the Great Barrier Reef lies a drowned world — rivers, lakes, and beaches that human feet once crossed some sixty-five thousand years ago, when the sea sat eighty metres lower than it does today. A team of scientists and Indigenous rangers has spent twenty-four days at sea recovering sediment cores from that submerged landscape, seeking to reunite geological evidence with the oral traditions of Darumbal and Woppaburra peoples who have long carried stories of ancestors walking across country now lost to the ocean. It is a rare moment in which Western science does not