After seeing the falling star and a couple of beautiful clear nights I started to look into what the traditional owners of the land thought about the stars and planets.
The Aboriginal Australians were arguably the world’s first astronomers and their complex knowledge, observations and beliefs about the heavenly bodies have become an integral part of their culture as it has been passed down through songs, dance, ritual and stories for over 40,000 years. It predates the Babylonians, who developed a zodiac in 2,000 BC, the ancient Greeks, Chinese, Indians and Incas.
The Aborigines’ beliefs about the stars were part of a social and value system that accounted for the daily risings of the sun and moon and the passage of the constellations and planets across the night sky. They were not interested in mathematical positioning of the stars but incorporated all natural phenomena into their traditional rituals and everything is interconnected with the Dreaming, an ever-present reality of how the world was created.
Aboriginal creation stories root the creative power deep in the earth itself and not in the heavens. Originally it is believed that the earth was flat and featureless and the sky dark until the Ancestors emerged from the land and sky, taking the form of man and animals and inanimate forces like water and fire. By their presence, actions and journeys they created the landforms, celestial bodies and all living creatures. Aboriginals believe that through their culture and rituals they are part of the natural world and therefore co-creators.
They were not interested in the distance in kilometres between places but that distance was contingent on what happened on the journey, how the travellers felt and the things encountered on the trip. Their ‘astronomy’ is based on parameters of social organization – kinship, marriage systems, gender divisions and social structures.
Most of the Ancestors and their spirits are believed to be living in the land where they last encountered other figures of the Dreaming but there are also mythological figures associated with the sky and specific constellations. The Boorong people of western Victoria believed that Gnowee, the sun, was made by Pupperimbul, one of the Nurrumbunguttias or old spirits, who were removed to the heavens before man was created. The earth was in perpetual darkness until Pupperimbul cast an emu egg into space where it burst into flame and flooded the world with light. Chargee Gnowee, Venus, is seen as the sun’s sister and wife of Ginabongbearp, Jupiter, thus reflecting family relationships. The Needwonee people of southwest Tasmania believe a star, Moinee, the child of the sun and the moon, created their land. Moinee shaped the land and rivers but fought with his brother Dromerdene (Canopus) and the stars fell from the sky to create a tall standing stone and an inlet.
Understanding the sky was conceptual and as such tribal elders passed down knowledge to initiates who were deemed ready to receive it. Some stories were the exclusive secret of men and others, notably those about Pleiades, were the preserve of women. Besides the gender divisions different groups had different stories so coastal tribes have more stories relating to fishing, canoes and storms than inland groups. The Merriam people who live at the eastern end of the Torres Strait place great importance on their constellation of Tagai that incorporates the Western constellations of Sagittarius, Scorpio, the Southern Cross, Lupus, Corvus and part of Hydra. Tagai represents a fisherman standing up in a canoe holding a three pronged spear and incorporates twelve crewmen (the Pleiades and the stars in Orion’s belt). As Tagai proceeds across the sky it represents the Merriam seasons. Myths involving the seven sisters of Pleiades and their pursuer Orion have been recorded in various forms across the Western Desert and as far as South Australia.
The Aborigines’ knowledge of the southern sky was extraordinary for people dependent on naked eye astronomy and they made accurate observations of even inconspicuous fourth order stars. They devised and memorised a complex seasonal calendar based on pattern recognition of the stars. Rather than the Greek ‘join the dot’ pictorial images the Aborigines identified a whole cast of characters in their stories. The Aranda people of Central Australia distinguished star colours (red, blue, yellow and white) and in Eastern NSW the red star, Aldebaran, commemorates the story of a man who stole another man’s wife and hid in a tree. The angry husband set fire to the tree and the flames carried the adulterer into the sky where he still burns red.
Generally across Australia the Aborigines shared a similar cosmology in which the universe had four tiers, similar to the medieval European three level view. The earth is imagined as a flat disc surrounded by water and covered by a solid sky dome. Beyond the dome is a land of beautiful flowers and rivers where the spirits of the dead are carried and we see them as stars shining through holes in the cover. The sky dome is supported by trees guarded by an old man or held from above by the stars and the emu whose nest is in the Coal Sack. Beneath the earth is a lower world through which the sun travels on her nightly journey from west to east.
North of Sydney there are some rock carvings that are thought to represent some of the constellations and even supernova events from 1066 or even 12,000 years ago. These rock carvings are close to the engraved representations of two ancestral sky heroes, Biame and Daramalan.
The Aboriginal Australians noted the correlation between the passage of star patterns with the seasonal supply of food and as a reminder of the moral lessons told in their myths. They typically see the sun as female and the moon as male, which is different to the Greeks and American Indians. She wakes in the east and lights a bark torch that she carries across the sky to the west and spills ochre and red powder as she sets.
The Milky Way is seen as the great sky river in which the bright stars are fish, the smaller stars are lily bulbs and the Coal Sack is a large plum tree or lily pads. The Southern Cross is variously seen as a stingray being pursued by a shark, two brothers at two campfires cooking a giant fish or the footprint of a giant wedge-tailed eagle. Interestingly the Greek and Aboriginal legends about Orion and the Pleiades are very similar with the former seen as a hunter or rapist and the latter as seven sisters or girls fleeing from the unwanted advances. Scorpio is prominent in the Southern sky and is often associated with two lovers who violated tribal law and fled to the sky where they are pursued by tribal elders who are throwing boomerangs and have dislodged the boy’s tribal headdress in the chase.
Comets were seen as sky canoes carrying the spirits of the dead to their permanent homes or the gleaming eyes of the spirit men searching for victims to kill and suck blood from. Meteors are often seen as flaming spears thrown across the sky by the ancestral beings.
So the Aboriginal Australians were concerned with observing the patterns of stars and integrating the stories into their daily life and rich culture. How sad that so much of their 40,000 years of culture has been destroyed or taken away from them. We respectfully renamed the property Daramalan after the spirit sky hero and acknowledge the traditional owners of our land, the Gandangara.
