Forget Sudoku and cryptic crosswords, Australia's senior memory champion looks to ancient indigenous cultures from around the world for memory techniques.

Author and academic Lynne Kelly, who won the over-60 category of the Australian Memory Championships in 2017 and 2018, said she was living proof that memory could be improved.

"I have a naturally really bad memory," said Dr Kelly, who lives in Castlemaine, Victoria.

Having struggled to learn languages at school, she is astounded that as an adult she has been able to learn and retain French and Mandarin.

"I have all these techniques at my fingertips to use all the time," Dr Kelly said.

She said games like Sudoku only improved people's ability to play Sudoku and became very repetitive.

"Why not memorise something useful?" Dr Kelly said.

Instead she was fascinated by the ability of ancient cultures to retain vast amounts of information about plants and animals using memory methods.

In her book Memory Craft, Dr Kelly explores a range of techniques including using the landscape and handheld physical devices to help memorise information.

"Essentially you are taking location after location of physical space and associating information with it," Dr Kelly said.

"Your brain will associate the physical location with the information — it's called a temporal snapshot."