Ancient Knowledge: Indigenous Astronomy

When you look up here, you're reading the oldest story on Earth

Most stargazing starts with a telescope. This one starts with the ground beneath your feet. The land along the Mid North Coast is part of a continent so ancient that its western half solidified when the Earth's crust was still forming — and for at least 65,000 years, the people of this country have been reading the night sky above it as a living map, a calendar, and a library all at once.

At Starry Night Tours, we point the telescope at planets and star clusters, but the sky over Look At Me Now Headland has been guiding, teaching and story-keeping here far longer than any lens. Before you join us under it, it's worth understanding just how deep that connection runs.

All over the world traditional cultures have had a strong connection with their locality and the sky above. Nowhere is this truer than on the ancient continent of Australia. The land itself, particularly the western half, is an ancient shield which most likely formed when the Earths crust solidified several billion years ago. The huge deposits of iron ore in Western Australia were probably laid down as the first complex lifeforms started producing oxygen in quantities sufficient to combine with iron and extract it from the landscape.

About a billion years ago, sufficient iron had been extracted that the oxygen still being produced began to accumulate in the atmosphere, clearing the sky and giving it its distinctive shade of blue.

The Earth was no longer a poisonous, hostile environment and the Cambrian explosion that occurred 500 million years ago and ultimately led to the evolution of all species including humans, would not have been possible otherwise.

The progress of life on this planet is documented in the fossil record and, by and large, is well understood. The Australian continent has experienced major changes in climate and changing carbon dioxide levels over millions of years have wrought great changes in the landscape. But there is something really elemental about the continent we now call Australia, something which has always been informed by the circumstances of its formation. Deep Time has a special meaning here.

It was into this environment 65,000 years ago, at the time a lush, well-watered landscape with diverse flora and fauna very different from today, that the original human occupants of the land arrived.

The history of human occupancy, almost entirely Indigenous, is expressed in their songs, their ceremonies and their care of the land in ways that we Europeans are only just beginning to fathom. And the more we learn, the more profound and relevant the Knowledge of the Elders is shown to be.

I realised very recently that Western knowledge, based in empiricism, is no more important than any other. Western knowledge is simply one stream, with its own structure, and it does actually fit into the matrix as surely and as neatly as the others and all of them compliment and reinforce each other in their own way.

The Aboriginal people of Australia proved to be expert managers of the land and developed a complex system of storytelling, which Margo Neale (Gumbayngirr and Wiradjuri) describes as akin to a vast neural network stretching across an entire continent. Songlines, literally pathways (lines) described by songs, lie at the very centre of the process.

Encouraged by the work of Lynne Kelly, whose field of research is the use of memory methods used by oral cultures, I “found” a map of the east coast of NSW in a prominent summer constellation. It has stayed with me, and this has dramatically deepened my appreciation for Indigenous culture and practice.