Milky Way setting over the Pinnacles, Western Australia. Credit:CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication
As a young astrophysicist in England, Professor Ray Norris was very involved in looking at Bronze Age stone circles and “things like that.”
“You know, Stonehenge and everything,” he says by phone from Sydney.
Norris was interested in how the ancient structures might relate to astronomy.
So, when he moved Down Under in 1983, he posed what he still considers a natural question: “Is there anything like that in Australia?”
Now based at CSIRO’s Australia Telescope National Facility and University of Western Sydney, Norris conducts part of his research in Aboriginal Astronomy.
“People had done work on this before,” says Norris. “But mainly about songs and stories of the sky.
“What I was really interested in was whether Aboriginal people had really studied the sky, and understood how the sky works, because there’d been very little written about that and I didn’t see much evidence for it.
“So, spoiler alert,” he says with mock drama. “Yeah, they really did.”
And that finding really “shook” the Englishman.
Famed for an intimate knowledge of landscape, or Country, Aboriginal Australians also had knowledge of a “Sky Country”.
“It went from just being a passing interest to, my God, this is absolutely fascinating.
“These guys really knew the sky well and were exploring it, trying to understand how things work and that really fascinated me.”
In the years since, this revelation has taken Norris to some of Australia’s most remote spots, introduced him to a tightknit group of new colleagues across both the sciences and humanities, and granted him a close-up view of Australian Indigenous cultural knowledges to which few are privy.
With generous and revelatory advice from Aboriginal knowledge holders, Norris and his team in the emerging field of Cultural Astronomy are unravelling how Indigenous understandings of the night sky is intimately linked to understanding and navigating the “songlines”.
Their cross-cultural mission may give settler Australians an understanding of what some call “sky country,” and perhaps help Aboriginal people themselves restore some of their knowledge lost since the colonisation of Australia from the 18th century.
In January, the group’s research became a chapter in the prestigious Oxford Handbook of Global Indigenous Archaeologies, entitled “The Role of Astronomy in Indigenous Knowledges”.
What are songlines?
Coined by British travel writer Bruce Chatwin in his 1987 book of the same name, the songlines are ancient routes of trade and travel that criss-crossed precolonial Australia joining important cultural sites and allowing walkers to safely traverse even its driest and most remote reaches.
In an Indigenous worldview, people today are descended from totemic ancestors that created the landscape and laid down laws for living. All of this occurred during a period that in English is called The Dreaming, in Arrernte (Central Australia), Altyerrenge, and in languages of the Western Desert near Uluru, Tjukurrpa.
The Dreaming is a time both long ago and now, anthropologist Bill Stanner’s term “everywhen” perhaps the most accessible translation, though as Stanner also observes “neither ‘time’ nor ‘history’ as we understand them is involved in this meaning.”
Also called Ancestral or Dreaming Tracks, the Songlines trace pathways taken by the Ancestors as they walked across a primeval Earth creating hills, valleys, rivers and soakages as they went.
Storytelling from these routes is the basis of Indigenous law and history, sacred to Aboriginal culture, and long passed down from generation to generation over millennia.
The stories and ‘songs’ also provide a way of navigating the numerous and interlinked Ancestor’s tracks.
As ANU anthropologist Alan Rumsey writes: “Totemic ancestors did not merely emerge from the earth but moved across it, forming places that are thereby linked with each other in tracks, or through underground connections.”
Expanding non-Indigenous understandings of the tracks often uses Chatwin’s rich analogy to music, MQU’s Dr Bob Fuller explaining that songlines help people navigate outside their own Country, the routes of travel being “taught using the mnemonic qualities of song.”
Similarly, and further emphasising their interconnectedness, Foundation Chair of Australian Indigenous Studies at University of Melbourne Professor Marcia Langton suggests the songlines are, indeed, “a song series”.
Navigating songlines
Respected Wardaman elder of Australia’s Top End Yidumduma Bill Harney has promoted Aboriginal culture over many decades, particularly through astronomy and art.
From Harney, Norris says, he learned how Aboriginal people travelled long distances across Australia as “exceptional navigators”.
“One way is the songlines,” says Norris. “Another is (astronomy); in the case of Bill, he knows the sky amazingly well.
“You can stand with him on a starry night, point to any star and he’ll tell you its name, probably tell you a story about it or how it fits the stories and the stars around it.”
Yidumduma Bill Harney (left) and Roy Norris (right) at the “First Astronomers”, Darwin Festival & Science Week, August 2009. Credit: Beck Allen, public domain
Bill has a “tremendous memory”, Norris urges, suggesting that of the 6,000 visible stars in the sky, Bill can name “pretty well every one.”
“But what’s even more impressive is that he carries this mental map in his head.
“So if somebody asks you where’s South … Bill just looks at the sky and he knows where South is: it’s very intuitive for him.
“And he corrects that for the time of year and the time of night and everything. “
For Bill, Norris muses, walking around at night is “as if there’s this map above him with all the directions.”
“It’s very impressive.”
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Another prominent culture man, from the Euahlayi community of northern NSW, has proven indispensable for the cultural astronomers and appears as co-author on several works.
Well known for his role in setting up the ‘Aboriginal Tent Embassy’ in Canberra in 1972, Ghillar Michael Anderson is also an astronomer, senior Law Man and elder of the Euahlayi Nation in northern New South Wales.
Anderson says while astronomical knowledge was passed down orally and through art, travelling the songlines was also long in play as a teaching tool.
“We’ve got a lot of knowledge in those areas that focuses attention on what our laws are and whose law governs what, and what areas of land,” Anderson told Cosmos.
“So, as we travel, we get to understand those things, all those law sites that you see along the stars, (and) when we get to certain locations, we understand whose country we’re in and which laws belong to that place.”
While most stars that align at certain times of year represent water holes and campsites, Anderson says, other more familiar indicators were also important.
“Along the pathway you will always find scarred trees, rocky areas where the old people used to break up rocks and get some utensils that they might use on the way.
“And you’ll see where they cut certain things out of trees, so, you’ve got a roadway, a pathway, and a well-trodden pathway.
“You know you’re on the right track because there are symbols along the way of use and occupation.”
Norris writes that Anderson’s community used stories linked to the stars to teach people the route to ceremonial and trading locations outside their own Country.
“They used a pattern of stars … to create a mnemonic of ‘waypoints’ across the landscape beyond their Country to the destination, which was taught to people about to make the journey.”
“The waypoints were often waterholes or significant points in the landscape.”
And the waypoints were sung, constituting “instructions made up of a series of linked songs that incorporated cultural knowledge”.
So, was it all as easy as travellers looking at the sky, lining up a star with a feature in the landscape, and deciding: “We go that way”?
Not necessarily, Anderson tells Cosmos: “We are doing that, but that’s not the only reason.
“Maybe along the way there is a water hole, and that water hole has a meaning (and) may serve us with other connections (to) other songlines.
“And that line may not be human but (still) may be a pathway … the animals might track that way, so we know that’s a migratory route of emus or kangaroos or goannas.”
Given people often walked of a daytime, it makes sense that stars were not always used for actual navigation.
“By the summer travel months,” Norris writes, “those same stars were not visible at night.
“They were, however, a pattern similar to the route to be travelled, and each star one ‘waypoint’ in the mnemonic.”
Such travelling may also have been an effective way to preserve stories and knowledge in an oral culture, the authors conclude.
Perhaps, we may all have once practised such a storytelling?