Aboriginal Australian societies are believed to be among the oldest continuous cultures on the planet. Some of their oral traditions appear to preserve a cultural memory of celestial events from multiple millennia in the past. Aboriginal Australians were also keen observers of the heavens and recognized phenomena both common and rare, from the solstices, to solar eclipses, to auroral sounds, and stellar variability.

Transcript

Good evening, and welcome to the Song of Urania, a podcast about the history of astronomy from antiquity to the present with new episodes every full moon. My name is Joe Antognini. Last month we at long last wrapped up our tour of Chinese astronomy so it’s now time to turn elsewhere. Now, I am afraid that I am going to do something of a disservice to the rest of east Asia because there have been many cultures besides China in the region that have a long history of astronomy: Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, and others besides. And in fact I’ve already had occasion to briefly mention Japanese astronomy in connection with some of the supernova records in Episode 39. But while these cultures have all had their unique astronomical traditions, due to their proximity to their much more powerful neighbor, these traditions were heavily influenced by Chinese astronomy. And given that the tagline of this podcast promises that it will be a history up until the present day, I’m going to have to cut a few corners if we’re going to reach the present millennium before this century is out. So this month I wanted to move on to a region with a very distinct astronomical tradition — that of Oceania.

Oceania is, of course, a gigantic region, encompassing Australia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. So in this episode we will focus on the largest landmass in the region: Australia. But even here, much like Episode 29 on the astronomy of Subsaharan Africa, the treatment is necessarily going to be somewhat impressionistic. Australia is home to hundreds of different Aboriginal groups, all of which have their own unique astronomical traditions, and most of these have not been documented by Western scholarship. And even among those groups whose astronomy has been documented have generally only had a small fraction of their tradition has been written down. So I’ll have to give the disclaimer that this can by no means be a comprehensive treatment.

Well, as longtime listeners will know I always like to start our exploration of the astronomy of a new culture by looking at the underlying geography since the geography invariably influences where and how its inhabitants live. Australia may be the world’s smallest continent, but it is nevertheless still an entire continent and it has a diversity of climates. Geologically Australia is fairly unique in that much of it is quite old. The western half of the continent is a feature known in geology as a “shield,” which is an extensive area where molten rock cooled and solidified. This part of the continent formed more than two billion years ago and among the oldest known rocks are found in this area. Due to this feature the western half of Australia is fairly flat. The elevation is generally highest near the western coast and then gradually falls off towards the center of the continent. The western sliver along the coast around the city of Perth has a Mediterranean climate, but as you move inland the climate quickly transitions to desert. Without any mountains to break up airflow and trigger precipitation, the center of the continent gets very little rain. The different regions have different characteristics and so get different names like the Gibson Desert, the Tanami Desert, the Simpson Desert, the Great Victoria Desert and so on, but collectively they form the Central Australia Deserts. These deserts support very little human habitation. Although the various deserts make up some three quarters of Australia by land, fewer than five percent of the population resides there. But as we’ll see later, these areas have all been continuously inhabited by Aboriginal Australians.

As you start to get to the eastern end of the continent you run into the Great Dividing Range, where the relatively flat topography from the shield gets broken up a younger geology with mountains and hills. These then can collect precipitation and feed the river systems in the east of the country. Because of this geology most of Australia’s present day population is along its eastern and southeastern coast. These mountainous features are most prominent in the very southeast of the country with a mountain range called the Australian Alps. And just south of that, across a body of water called the Bass Strait, is the island of Tasmania, which is the most temperate part of Australia.

The north of the country starts to get into tropical latitudes. And around the northeast of Australia there is a peninsula called Cape York which reaches up into the Torres Strait across from which, less than a hundred miles away, is Papua New Guinea. The Torres Strait is dotted with nearly three hundred islands. This region of Australia is impacted by a monsoon system which hits Indonesia and Papua New Guinea and receives by far the most rainfall in Australia. For this reason this region has historically had the largest population of Aboriginal Australians.

So, to sum it all up, Australia pretty much has it all, deserts, rainforests, temperate coastal plains, mountains, you name it, but the vast majority of the area is quite inhospitable. Nevertheless, Aboriginal Australians have lived in all corners of the continent and have had to adapt to these radically different climates.

The first Aboriginal Australians arrived in Australia very early on. Genetic studies indicate that their ancestors left Africa perhaps around 75,000 years ago and arrived in Australia around 60,000 years ago. Though, to be precise, this was long enough ago that when they arrived the continent of Australia as we know it did not exist. This was in the midst of the Last Glacial Period, or more informally, the Ice Age. At the time that the Aboriginal Australians began to populate what is today Australia, sea levels were around 110 meters lower than at present day. To put this in context, the worst case projection for sea level rise due to climate change by 2100 is around two meters. So the coastlines in low lying areas looked very different then than it does today. In particular, at the time Australia and New Guinea were not separated by water, nor was Tasmania. They instead formed a continuous landmass called Sahul. Similarly, many of the islands of Indonesia were connected by land to Asia and they formed a landmass Sunda. The lower sea level made migration from the Asian mainland across the islands that today make up Indonesia and then on to Sahul much easier.

The Last Glacial Period reached its maximum around 26,000 years ago and the Earth began warming. But around 12,000 years ago this warming accelerated quite rapidly and over the course of a few millennia sea levels rose to nearly their present day level. By 6500 BC Australia had become disconnected from New Guinea and Tasmania had become disconnected from the Australian mainland. The Bass Strait, in particular, is wide enough that it’s believed that Aboriginal Australians on Tasmania never had any further contact with the mainland until the arrival of European voyagers in the late 18th century.

Well, even after the rising sea levels separated Australia from New Guinea, the islands across the Torres Strait are numerous enough and close enough to each other that the Torres Strait Islanders could maintain contact with Aboriginal Australians on the mainland as well as the indigenous Austronesian peoples of New Guinea. It seems that around 4000 years ago this contact led to the introduction of the dingo, and possibly some intermarriage. Nevertheless, these contacts were rare enough that for all practical purposes the Aboriginal Australians on the mainland were culturally isolated from the rest of the world until the arrival of Europeans in the late 18th century.

Over the millennia that the Aboriginal Australians inhabited the continent, they fanned out and over time fragmented into around 500 distinct cultural groups with about 300 unique languages. And even these languages can be quite distinct from each other with around 30 language families and perhaps a dozen or so isolates which are not related to any other language on the continent. The long isolation also promoted the evolution of genetic adaptations to the harsh climate. Aboriginal Australians who reside in the Central Deserts have a mutation in the genes which regulate thyroxine, which is used by the body to maintain its internal temperature. These mutations allow carriers to maintain a higher internal body temperature without the typical metabolic damage caused by a fever.

Well, given the wide diversity of climates and cultures in Australia there is not a tremendous amount that one can say that applies generally to all of these groups. But there are a few practices which many Aboriginal Australian groups share. One of these is avoidance relationships. The most common, and typically the strongest of these, is between a man and his mother-in-law. In many groups the two people may not speak to each other, refer to each other by name, or even see each other. One hypothesis for this practice is that it was common in many Aboriginal Australian groups for women to marry not long after puberty, whereas men typically would not get married until much later in life. So it would often be the case that a man and his mother-in-law would be roughly the same age and might be attracted to each other. These kinds of avoidance relationships may have served to prevent any affairs from developing.

Similarly, many cultures practiced avoidance relationships between brothers and sisters. In childhood brothers and sisters would grow up and play together, but once a boy went through a rite of passage and was considered a man, he ceased communication with his sister. Here it’s been hypothesized that this practice evolved to prevent the development of incestuous relationships.

There is another common practice among many Aboriginal groups that may also be a mechanism to promote genetic diversity and prevent inbreeding. Many groups have a concept which is called a “skin group” in Aboriginal Australian English. Skin groups might be thought of as somewhat akin to clans in other cultures, but they are typically more formalized and complicated. In its most basic structure, the people that make up an Aboriginal group might be divided into, say eight or sixteen skin groups. Your skin group would be determined by the skin group of one or both of your parents. You would not be permitted to marry any member from your own skin group, even if you shared no familial relationship. However in some groups there can be a typing that extends horizontally across generations rather than vertically through different generations, and the type would alternate between generations. In this case, you might only be able to marry an individual with the same generational typing as you — so, someone from your generation and not from your parents, though marriage to someone from your grandparents’ generation would be acceptable as well.

Aboriginal Australian societies were very frequently polygynous, and in some cases extremely so. Among the Tiwi off the coast of North Australia, some men may have twenty or even thirty wives. But these marriage relationships are not necessarily sexual. Being able to support a wife is a sign of social status, and the more you have the better. It’s expensive to support a wife, so a man might not marry his first wife until he is in his late thirties. By contrast, among the Tiwi, women were always married, from the moment they are born until the time they die. If a man is lucky, his first wife will be an elder woman who can help show him the ropes in his new role. It may be many more years before he marries a woman who is of reproductive age.

Another common practice is a taboo on speaking the name of a person after their death. The amount of time that the name may not be spoken varies depending on the group and the status of the individual who died, but is typically between one and a few years. A general belief among Aboriginal Australians is that a person’s spirit travels to a spirit-world after their death, also translated as the sky-world, although this isn’t taken to mean that they are literally in the sky. If a person’s name is spoken, or among some groups if their photograph is shown, this could impair their journey to the spirit world and recall them back to the Earth where they might cause destruction. Anyone who wants to refer to a recently deceased person has to do so in a roundabout way.

One theory on the relatively high diversity of languages on the continent is that language development may have been accelerated by the fact that words frequently had to be replaced with circumlocutions to avoid violating the naming taboo.

Well, the spirit world from which people’s spirits came and to which they returned after death is connected to another fundamental concept across many Aboriginal cultures: the Dreamtime, or the Dreaming. The Dreamtime really lies at the heart of the Aboriginal Australian worldview, so it’s somewhat difficult to summarize. Like my earlier summary of Confucianism back in Episode 37, this description will necessarily be inadequate. But at its core the idea of the Dreamtime is that there is some central, eternal source of all things. The great spirits and ancestors and all people today originated in the Dreamtime. But the Dreamtime is not limited to being just a kind of place from which things spring out of — it is at all times and connected to all places. In this view it has alternately been translated as the “everywhen.” But again, the Dreaming is not just some vague, fuzzy feeling of oneness that all things share. It also encompasses a kind of right action and behavior that is in harmony with the group and with the land.

One of the consequences of the Dreamtime, and one of the reasons that I am spending so much time describing various cultural practices and beliefs of Aboriginal Australians is that there is a very deep connection between the sky and everything else. There is a motto that originates in Western Medieval astrology that goes “As above, so below.” The idea is that there are correspondences between the macrocosmos and the microcosmos — what happens in the heavens is reflected on Earth, and what happens on Earth is reflected in the heavens. And this idea is very consonant with Aboriginal Australian conceptions of the heavens.

So the ways that Aboriginal Australians read the skies are closely tied to the seasonal rhythms of their activities on the ground. From a Western perspective it is tempting to simply view the various markers of seasonal change that are observed in the heavens over the course of the year as simple mnemonics that people would use to keep track of where they were in the year, and when it was time to plant or fish or hunt and so forth. But within the Dreamtime the connection is much deeper. When, for example, the emu constellation rises and signals the start of the season to collect emu eggs, collecting emu eggs is in harmony with what is in the heavens, and the heavens are in harmony with the activity on the Earth.

Well, one last disclaimer before we really get into some of the details of Aboriginal astronomy is that astronomical knowledge, along with other spiritual and mythological concepts like the Dreamtime, could appropriately be described as at least esoteric or possibly even gnostic, at least in a loose sense of the term. Knowledge of many of these concepts is restricted to certain elders. These restrictions even fall along gender lines. Elder men are permitted to know certain kinds of things, generally translated as “Men’s business,” and elder women are allowed to know other kinds of things, translated as “Women’s business.” Those who are not elders might be permitted to know certain general things, but won’t be permitted to learn the full, hidden knowledge until their time comes. So, Western scholars don’t have the full picture of Aboriginal astronomy and spirituality, just glimpses here and there through windows they have been permitted to look through.

Well, in most groups it’s the case that every adult is expected to have at least some rudimentary ability to read the stars and use this to help them navigate and inform when to plant or harvest throughout the year. In fact among the Meriam people who live on a number of islands in the eastern part of the Torres Strait, there is the concept of “purut.” Purut is a time reserved during the year when there are especially clear skies where a family will sleep out at the beach under the stars and will stargaze and hear stories about the heavens. But beyond this general knowledge groups will also have individuals who specialize in astronomical knowledge. In the Torres Strait Islands this person is known as the Zugubau Mabaig, which literally translates to “star person.” The Zugubau Mabaig is a respected role in these societies.

One example of the importance of the role of the Zugubau Mabaig is at the culmination of the initiation rituals for boys. As a general rule, the initiation rituals across Aboriginal Australian societies are not simply pro forma affairs. They are quite intense, physically and mentally, and not every initiate will be able to complete or even survive the rituals. In the Torres Strait the entire initiation process for boys lasts for seven years as they are bit by bit taught the culture’s rituals, myths, sacred dances, and everything else having to do with Men’s Business. At the end of the seven years they conduct a raid of a neighboring island, during which an initiate must kill an enemy warrior and return with his skull. Among the Torres Strait Islanders possession of a skull was believed to grant the prowess of the dead warrior upon the skull’s possessor. This belief is not uncommon among groups with a strong warrior culture. We saw back in Episode 23 how the Greek astronomer Posidonius was astonished at the Celtic obsession with displaying the severed heads of their enemies.

Well, a key component of this initiation ritual was that the raid could only be conducted during a lunar eclipse. When the eclipse began, the men and the initiates would gather together and would begin to ceremonially recite the various islands of the Torres Strait. They would then stop the recitation once the moon emerged from the eclipse. The last island to be named before the recitation halted became the target of the raid. Incidentally, this raid was considered to be a purely defensive attack. For the Torres Strait Islanders, the purpose of the ritual during the lunar eclipse was not to choose a victim, but to divine an oncoming attack. The ritual divined who was planning on attacking them, and so in self defense, they would pre-emptively strike first.

Of course, this ceremony requires foreknowledge of the occurrence of a lunar eclipse, and this was the responsibility of the Zugubau Mabaig. How exactly the Zugubau Mabaig predicts the occurrence of a lunar eclipse, however, has not yet been shared with ethnographers, and this is an ongoing area of research. One possibility is that the Zugubau Mabaig tracks past eclipses and follows a cycle like the Saros cycle.

The conjunction of a lunar eclipse with the culmination of the initiation ritual among some of the Torres Strait Islanders is not the only initiation ritual that has a celestial connection. In southeast Australia the initiation ritual is known as the “Bora Ceremony.” Two ceremonial grounds are constructed by making large circles of rocks separated by about 200 yards. One of these circles is for the general community, and the other is reserved for the men and the initiates. The two circles are then connected by a path that is oriented along the direction of the Milky Way in the early evening when the ceremony takes place.

Well, the most important astronomical phenomenon for the Aboriginal Australians, as with everyone else on Earth, is the motion of the Sun throughout the year. Throughout Australia the summer and winter solstices were well understood and were important events in the calendar. On the island of Mer in the Torres Strait, the Meriam people divide the year into two parts: the “lim dege eupamaretli,” which literally translates to “shorter days and longer nights,” and the “lim eipuge eupamaretli” which translates to “longer days and shorter nights.” The Meriam people recognize two paths that the Sun takes in the sky, a higher path during the wet season around the summer solstice, and a lower path during the dry season around the winter solstice.

To identify the dates of the solstices, most groups seem to have used geographical landmarks. One description of this was written by the Australian poet Mary Gilmore. In the early 1930s she wrote a memoir in which she described how her father had learned that the Aboriginal Australians marked the solstices. She wrote,

I was too young to keep in mind all that he said about how they measured for the period, except that it was done by means of certain fixed mountain-rocks known to the tribes. One of these was somewhere near the head of the Clarence River. It was a rock mass that neither earthquake nor landslide could shake out of position. When the Sun’s edge at setting just touched the down line on one side of this rock, it marked the period of the Sun’s turning … the solstice was either just then, or within so many days of that. Watch was kept by those chosen for this duty, which was the utmost importance, the year being measured by it, and tribal ceremonies dependent on it for date.

A good example of this technique is seen on the island of Mua, which is another Torres Strait island. Mua is situated within an archipelago, and there are a number of islands to the west, a few miles away. These islands are distant, but still visible on the horizon. By observing where the sun set in relation to these islands, the people on Mua could mark time throughout the year. At the winter solstice, the sun would set over a hill on the island of Tuin to the northwest. When it began to set between the islands of Tuin and Matu they knew that the winds would soon start to change and this would herald the start of the dry season. The equinox was marked when the Sun set over a hill on the island of Maitak. When it sets between Matu and Kulbai Kulbai the monsoon season is imminent. At this time of the year the turtles float on the surface of the water and are easier to hunt. The summer solstice is marked when the Sun sets at the southern tip of Kulbai Kulbai. As the Sun then starts to move north again it eventually sets at the southern end of Tuni and Ngul and this marks the time to harvest yams. This coincides with the heliacal rising of Achernar, known in their language as “Kek” or the “yam star”.

Well, the peoples of Australia follow the nearly universal practice of assigning two different genders to the Sun and the Moon. But which celestial body gets which gender varies from group to group. Some associate the Sun with the masculine and the Moon with the feminine, and others associate the Sun with the feminine and the Moon with the masculine. Across the world both associations are seen, but there seems to be a clear preference among most cultures to associate the Sun with the masculine and the Moon with the feminine. But this same preference doesn’t seem to exist among Aboriginal Australians. For instance, the Yolŋu people, who live in Northern Australia, see the Sun as a woman bearing a torch across the sky, who then travels underground during the night. This image also appears among the Tiwi, who live nearby on a pair of islands just off the northern coast.

The image of the Sun following two paths in the sky, a winter path and a summer path, also appears among the Guugu Yimidhirr, who live in the northeast of the country. There, the Moon is taken to be a man who is married to a pair of sisters. Each sister is one of the paths of the Sun during the year. The older sister visits in the cold season, and the younger sister visits in the hot season. In the Central Deserts the Sun is also seen as a woman who hates the cold. During the winter months, when it gets cold, she rolls away to the north, where it is hotter, so she can keep warm, and this is why the Sun is low in the sky during winter.

Likewise among many cultures the Moon is considered to be male and oftentimes the maria on the Moon, the dark splotches we see on the Moon’s face, are interpreted to be evidence of some past violence done to the Moon. So, among the Boorong in Northwest Victoria there is a story where the Moon was a man in the form of a marsupial named Mityan. He tried to steal the wives of Nganurganity, who was a man in the form of a lizard. Nganurganity attacked Mityan to fend him off, and the Moon now has bruises on its face.

A similar kind of story comes from the Tiwi off the North coast. The story goes like this: a long time ago the Tiwi were immortal. There was a man named Purukupali and he had an infant son with his wife Wai-ai. One day, Wai-ai was off foraging in the bush and she had left the child underneath the shade of a tree. As she was out foraging, Wai-ai stumbled upon Purukupali’s brother, Tjapara. When they saw each other, they lusted after each other and made love together. Having fallen in love with him, the two then made love together. But Wai-ai was gone for so long that the sun had moved, exposing the baby, and when she returned the child had died from the heat. When Purukupali discovered what had happened he was furious and beat Tjapara with spears and clubs. To escape the attack, Tjapara fled into the sky, where he became the moon, and the maria on the moon are his bruises. Purukupali then picked up his child and performed the first funeral rites. He then declared, “now that my son is gone, we shall all have to follow,” and from then on all living beings must suffer death. Only Tjapara escaped this fate by fleeing to the sky, and then only partially. Every month he wanders the heavens alone eating mangrove crabs and growing fatter until he becomes the full moon. But eating all the crabs make him ill, and then he withers away and dies for three days. He then re-emerges as a thin crescent, representing his ribs in his emaciated state. The faint outline of the rest of the Moon represents his spirit. The phases of the Moon are then a reminder of the perpetual cycle of life and death.

Well, the maria can be an indication of some past trauma even if the genders are switched. Among the Palawa of Eastern Tasmania, the Sun is associated with the masculine and the Moon with the feminine. There is a story that the Sun, named Parnuen, came upon a woman named Vena cooking fish on an iceberg and fell in love with her. He went to carry her off to the heavens, but in the process dropped her and she fell into the fire and was badly burned on her side. When Parnuen successfully carried her into the heavens the second time, she became the moon, and the burns and ashes became the maria. Incidentally, there is a fascinating postscript to this story of Parnuen and Vena among the Palawa. The story describes how Parnuen and Vena then went on to have two children. The first born was named Moinee, and he was big and strong, and they placed him in the south where he never moved. Indeed he was the only star that never moved. Later on, Vena was sitting on an iceberg, but the iceberg melted and Vena drowned. In his rage, Parnuen melted all the icebergs and they never returned.

Now, there is quite a bit of circumstantial, but very intriguing evidence that the oral traditions of Aboriginal Australians have persisted for an exceedingly long time, possibly many millennia, and this story is one such piece of evidence. Today there is no bright star near the south celestial pole. There’s no southern hemisphere version of Polaris in the northern hemisphere. But due to the precession of the Earth this was not always the case. About 14,000 years ago Canopus, the second brightest star in the night sky, was fairly close to the south celestial pole, within 10 degrees. This could plausibly have been the big, strong child of the Sun and the Moon that never moved. And a few millennia after Canopus came closest to the pole, the Last Glacial Period ended, and the icebergs across the globe melted and the sea levels rose and Tasmania was cut off from the Australian mainland.

The Palawa are by no means the only group whose oral tradition seems to record a great inundation that occurred in the distant past. One study recorded 21 separate groups which circle the entire continent who all have various stories about this great inundation. Even more intriguingly, some of these stories appear to describe geographical features which are today submerged, but were above water in the past, and were only rediscovered with modern technology. Along the eastern coast where the Great Barrier Reef is, a number of different groups have stories that say that once upon a time the shoreline was where the reef is today. The geography around the Great Barrier Reef would actually appear to be quite dramatic if it weren’t under water. The reef is at the edge of a relatively flat coastline, but then has a steep cliff where the coast drops down into the continental shelf. But today this is all submerged under water. 14,000 years ago, however, this area would have been exposed. Among the Gungganyji there is a story that there was a man named Gunya who caught and ate a fish that was forbidden by the spirits. The great spirits then made the sea rise in order to drown him and his family. But Gunya was able to escape by heading to higher ground. Nevertheless, the sea never returned to its original limits. The full story has a number of details as Gunya flees to higher ground. In his journey he meets other people from different tribes who were also forced to move upland to escape the water. Some of these locations are described as islands which are now submerged, and even describe the kinds of trees that grew on these islands. Eventually, the various tribes disperse throughout the mainland when the who area has been inundated.

But these oral traditions do not only describe sea level rise after the end of the Last Glacial Period. Other geological and astronomical events appear to be recorded. For our purposes one of the most striking sets of oral traditions has to do meteorite impacts, no pun intended. Australia has 26 known craters, but most of these are geologically quite old and predate human habitation of the continent. But four of them are relatively young and were formed within the last five millennia or so. One of these is the Henbury Crater Field, which is actually around a dozen separate craters from the same impact event in the Northern Territory. Over the course of a series of expeditions in the 1920s and 30s a prospector noticed that his Aboriginal guides would refuse to go within half a mile of the craters and wouldn’t camp within two miles of them. The guide told him that the name of the area was “chindu chinna waru chingi yabu,” which means “sun walk fire devil rock.” The guide explained that his grandfather had seen a fire-devil fall from the Sun and that it now lived in the rock hole. Among his people it was forbidden to drink the water that settled in the craters. If they did, the rock-devil would “fill them with a piece of iron.” Earlier ethnographic records indicate that the people in the area had a concept of “Arungquiltha,” which was a kind of evil magic which sometimes took the form of a ball of fire falling from the sky. When these balls of fire fell to the Earth they took the form of a mushroom, which continued to contain the evil magic. For this reason mushrooms were taboo and were not to be eaten.

Well, there are other kinds of oral traditions among the Aboriginal Australians that suggest a cultural memory of other, non-astronomical events like volcanic eruptions that occurred several millennia in the past. The persistence of memory among the Aboriginal Australians seems to be rather unusual. In other societies, anthropologists estimate that folklore, myths, and other oral traditions can record a historical event for perhaps five to seven centuries before the stories mutate so much that they become completely unconnected from the original event that inspired them. But there are a few factors that are present in Aboriginal Australian societies that seem to promote a much more stable oral tradition. The first is its relative isolation. After the end of the Last Glacial Period, there were no further large migration events onto the continent. Groups would be acquainted with their neighbors, but these relationships seem to have been stable over centuries. By contrast in many other parts of the world, certainly on the Eurasian landmass, every few centuries some new group of people would move in and their oral traditions would inevitably get mixed together to some extent. Another factor is that Aboriginal Australian societies placed a very high value on tradition. Of course this is not unique to the Aboriginal Australians, many pre-modern societies have also put high value in tradition and resisted experimentation. But one environmental factor that may have contributed to this is the harshness of the environment. In more hospitable environments there is a relatively low cost to experimentation. But in the arid outback, survival requires walking a very narrow path. As Aboriginal Australians learned ways to survive in this environment, they also learned that there were many more ways to perish. The surest way to survive was to repeat the behaviors that your ancestors had discovered. And the last factor that seems to have promoted an extremely long cultural memory is a permanence of place. Although groups would typically move from place to place with the seasons, they weren’t exactly nomadic. The same groups inhabited the same places for generations, and many of the stories in the oral traditions were grounded in particular geographical landmarks. For other societies in the world, these kinds of stories might be lost if the group ever migrated to a different location. But the infrequency of real migrations among the Aboriginal Australians also seems to have helped preserve a cultural memory of events for much longer than elsewhere.

Well, there is another category of events where this long oral tradition shows up, and that’s in solar eclipses. A particular location on Earth will see a total solar eclipse only every three or four hundred years on average. Nevertheless, many Aboriginal groups have stories around solar eclipses. This can be seen especially clearly among the Yolŋu, who live on Elcho Island off the northern coast. This island has seen only four total solar eclipses in the past 2500 years, and the last one was in 1100 AD. Nevertheless, their oral tradition tells of eclipses occurring when the Sun-woman and Moon-man embrace.

A similar description of solar eclipses comes from the Anangu on the other side of the continent in the Western Desert of South Australia. They tell of how sometimes the Sun-woman and Moon-man are guri-arra, which literally translates to “husband and wife together.” Then the spirit Maamu-Waddi holds up his hand to cover them for privacy.

One story from the Euahlayi in northern New South Wales tells of how Yhi, the Sun-woman, had many lovers, but one day fell in love with Bahloo, the Moon-man. Bahloo had no interest in Yhi, but Yhi pursued him anyway. So Bahloo ran away from Yhi and moved farther away from her every day. Now, the Euahlayi perceived the sky to be a dome held up by four poles attached to ropes. Some of the spirit ancestors hold the ropes to keep the sky from falling. Yhi commanded these spirits not to let Bahloo escape the heavens and come down to Earth. But every month at the new moon he manages to sneak past the spirits by disguising himself as an emu before dusk. Occasionally, however, he fails and Yhi captures him, grabs him and holds him close. But soon he manages to escape. On these rare occasions Yhi goes dark and we see a solar eclipse.

Well, the Sun and the Moon are, of course, not the only celestial objects to play a role in Aboriginal Australian astronomy. The planets are recognized as well as is their periodic retrograde motions. One elder described the motions of the planets as being like that of people. They do not move continuously in a single direction, but like people on a long journey, they pause from time to time, sometimes backtrack, and move here and there. The fact that the planets travel close to the ecliptic is also understood. Among the Kokatha in the Great Victoria Desert they call the ecliptic the “Dream Road.”

Of the five classical planets Venus has the most important place in Aboriginal Australian traditions as it gets the brightest and can appear prominently in the sky near the horizon after sunset or before sunrise. Like the Greeks, the Meriam people had separate names for Venus depending on whether it appeared in the morning or the evening sky. It was Iluel in the evening and Gerger Neseur in the morning. But it was understood that these were the same object since they never appeared in the sky at the same time. The Meriam people have a story that Iluel was the lover of Meb, the Moon-man. But their relationship was rocky and beset by jealousy. Meb was jealous of Iluel’s relationship with Lim, the Sun, since she always seemed to be close to him. Iluel, in turn, was jealous of Meb’s relationship with her sisters, the other planets, since he wanders throughout the sky with them, far from her. They come together once a month when the Moon is a crescent. But as the days progress, the Moon moves farther away from her. The waxing phase of the Moon is therefore called “Atkit Meb,” or a “jealous moon.”

The Yolŋu have a story which connects Venus to another phenomenon, the Zodiacal light. The Zodiacal light is a faint glow in the sky that appears as a narrow triangle along the ecliptic after sunset and before sunrise and is due to the reflection of sunlight off of dust in the Solar System. If you haven’t been to a dark site before you’ve probably never been able to see it, but in a dark site it can really be quite prominent. The Yolŋu associate Venus with Banumbirr, the creator spirit. A long time ago she would guide the newly dead to Buralku, the island of the dead. She flew overhead and named the features of the land as she passed over so that they could follow her. Fishermen asked her to join them in the morning and guide them, but she didn’t want to out of fear that if she ever were to fall out of the sky, she would drown. So, to prevent her from drowning, her sisters tied ropes to her. These white ropes are visible as the zodiacal light and this is why Venus never gets far from the horizon. The Yolŋu have a ceremony roughly every year and a half when Venus transitions from being an evening star to a morning star. Part of the ceremony uses a long wooden pole decorated with white strings falling off it to represent these ropes and the zodiacal light. Ordinarily Banumbirr is perceived to be holding Venus in her hand, but during the transition period Banumbirr sets Venus down and climbs up a pandanus tree to survey the country. As she looks out, she sees all the skin groups, and these are all depicted on the pole.

Well, one transient phenomenon that is recognized among Aboriginal Australians throughout the continent, but which appears more prominently among cultures in the south of the continent is the aurorae australis, or the southern lights. These are generally only visible at the higher latitudes, but during especially strong magnetic storms they can be seen in the north of the country as well. Aurorae were typically viewed as a warning of the consequences of violating a social taboo. Among the Pitjantjatjara of the Central Deserts there is a story that a long time ago a group of hunters killed and cooked a sacred emu. For their crime the hunters were cast into the sky and the smoke of their fire is seen as the aurorae. Among the Gunaikurnai people of southeast Australia there is a tale of a great ancestor named Mungan Ngour. Mungan Ngour created the initiation ceremony and then charged his son Tundun to carry out these rituals with the boys. Mungan Ngour decreed that knowledge of the initiation ritual should be restricted to men and that no woman should be privy to its rites. However, someone shared this knowledge with a woman. When Mungan Ngour learned of this, he became enraged and cast fire down on the Earth. In the chaos, the people then all attacked one another and Mungan Ngour sent a tsunami which killed them all. The aurorae are then a reminder to the people of the consequences of violating this sacred taboo.

But the aurorae are not always seen as occasional reminders of the wrath of the gods. At least among the Dharawal people of southeastern Australia, around the Sydney area, the aurorae were connected to a longer term cycle. The Dharawal recognized that aurorae appeared in a cycle of roughly eleven years, which matches the solar cycle. About every eleven years the Sun’s magnetic field flips its orientation, and during this flip, geomagnetic storms are much more frequent and stronger, and so aurorae appear more often, more strongly, and at lower latitudes. The Dharawal connected this eleven year cycle to a long term weather pattern which may have been related to the El Niño and La Niña cycles.

Another very intriguing observation is reports from a variety of Aboriginal Australian groups that aurorae have sounds and can be heard under the right circumstances. The Aboriginal Australians were not the only group to report this phenomenon. Inuit and Sami groups at very high northern latitudes also claim a similar thing, and auroral sounds show up in Scandinavian folklore as well. The sounds are described as clicking sounds, or whistling, or hissing, like the sound of rustling grass or someone walking through the snow. The Palawa people of Tasmania describe it as the sound of people snapping their fingers. For many years this phenomenon was dismissed as either a kind of hallucinations or a confusion of the real source of the sounds since there was no plausible mechanism by which aurorae could produce audible sounds. Aurorae are produced around 50 miles up in the atmosphere where the atmosphere is too thin to produce any audible sounds, certainly nothing that could be audible on the ground. It was long thought that perhaps the cold caused trees to crack as they froze, and that when people heard these sounds in the distance they connected them to the aurorae overhead. But about a decade ago, in 2012, a Finnish acoustician named Unto Laine set out a specialized microphone array and was able to capture these sounds. By triangulating the sources he was able to rule out trees, or any other ground based sources. Instead, the source of the audio came from above, from the atmosphere about 70 meters above ground. By correlating the audio recordings against the measurements of a magnetometer, he saw that the noises were louder when the magnetic field was fluctuating more. Although the phenomenon hasn’t been entirely explained, the working theory is that the atmosphere sometimes forms an inversion layer. Ordinarily, the temperature of the air gets cooler the higher up you go in the atmosphere. But sometimes there can be a low lying inversion layer, where a layer of hot air gets sandwiched between cooler air above and below. As the warm air rises from the ground, it carries negative ions along with it, and they get trapped in the inversion layer, and the inversion layer gradually gains a negative charge. During periods of bright auroral activity, positively charged particles rain down from the ionosphere. When they hit the negatively charged inversion layer, the charges neutralize and you get an effect like static electricity discharges.

Well, we’ve talked about just about everything that appears in the heavens except the stars, so I wanted to end by talking a little bit about Aboriginal perspectives on the stars. One of the ways that many groups refer to their astronomy is knowledge of how to read the stars. This includes, of course, constellations and heliacal risings, and I will get to those things in a moment, but a fundamental component of reading the stars is just being able to see what exactly they look like. In the West we speak of the stars twinkling, but we don’t go into much more detail than that. In our astronomy, twinkling is a nuisance that limits a telescope’s ability to resolve its targets. But the particular way that a star twinkle conveys a lot of information about what is going on in the upper atmosphere, and consequently, what the weather is liable to be like in the near future. The Wardaman people of Northern Australia keep track of how the stars are twinkling. During the hot season the skies are generally clear and still and the twinkling is limited. But when the stars begin twinkling more, this indicates that the winds are picking up and that the wet season will soon come. In particular, they know that the monsoon is approaching when Canopus twinkles heavily in the early morning in September. Many groups also distinguish between twinkling, which is caused by high winds in the upper atmosphere, and shimmering, which is caused by rising heat. The Meriam people in the Torres Strait identify four different states that the stars can be in: still; a state called epreki, which is related to the word for popping like the crackling of twigs in a fire; baprikeda, which is a quick twinkling, related to the word for sparks; and naskairseda, which is a slow twinkling and comes from the word for the change in color when embers float into the air above a fire. To accurately assess how the stars are twinkling, elders in these groups know to look at bright stars near the zenith. Stars on the horizon won’t give a good picture of oncoming weather conditions because their light is too strongly affected by atmospheric conditions far off in the distance.

In addition to the manner in which the stars are twinkling, Aboriginal Australian astronomers would also look at the stars’ colors. If the colors change as a star twinkles from blue-white to red-orange, that means that there are strong winds and that the temperature will soon change. However, if the color of blue-white stars is not changing and the twinkling is minimal, then there will be fine weather. Whitish stars can exhibit dramatic color changes because water absorbs red and green. So when there is high humidity in the atmosphere, these redder colors get absorbed, and the apparent color of the star changes. High humidity also tends to blur the edges of a star. The stars don’t appear quite so pointlike in these conditions. So this can indicate oncoming rain. The Yamaji of Western Australia in particular rely on the appearance of the Pleiades. They have a story that the Pleiades are being pursued by man represented by the constellation Orion. Since the Pleiades are to the west of Orion, as the sky rotates, the man appears to chase the Pleiades over the course of the night. When the Pleiades appear larger and clearer, the Yamaji know that they will have dry weather. But when they appear smaller and fuzzier, rain will be coming.

Of course the Aboriginal Australians don’t only look at the stars in isolation. Like every other culture across the globe, they group stars together to form constellations. Some of these groupings are familiar, even if they are interpreted differently. In the Torres Strait, the northernmost extent of Australia, the Big Dipper is visible low on the horizon at certain times of the year. The constellation appears upside down relative to how its perceived in the northern hemisphere and the Torres Strait islanders read it as a shark. During the time of the year when the shark is visible low on the horizon at sunset it is shark breeding season. The sharks tend to come closer to the shore then and so it’s dangerous to go into the water.

Some of the stories associated with the constellations have parallels to Western mythology. The Meriam people recognize a constellation called Tagai. The story goes that a long time ago, there was a man named Tagai who was a great warrior and fisher. He captained a canoe with his friend, Kareg, and a crew of twelve. During one expedition it was very hot and his men disobeyed Kareg’s orders and drank all the water. When Tagai discovered that they were out of water he was so angry that he cast half of the crew into the sky and these crew members formed the Pleiades. He then cast the other six into the sky and they became the belt and sword of Orion. Tagai and Kareg themselves then ascended into the heavens. He appears holding a spear and standing on a canoe. His right hand is the constellation Corvus and his left is the Southern Cross. In Western mythology, the constellations Orion and Scorpius appear on opposite sides of the sky due to their animosity — consequently they never share a sky together. And similarly, due to the animosity between Tagai and his crew, they are also on opposite sides of the sky and never appear together.

Aboriginal constellations differ from Western constellations in two ways, however. One is that the constellations are allowed to overlap and share stars. The other is that Aboriginal Australians recognize so-called “dark constellations.” The center of the Milky Way is much more prominent in the southern hemisphere, and in a very dark sky it’s possible to see dark bands across the Milky Way. These are due to dust clouds in the plane of the galaxy obscuring background stars. But many Aboriginal groups identify shapes in these dark bands. Among the Euahlayi of the northwest part of New South Wales, a large dark band across the Milky Way is perceived as an emu and its orientation acts as a kind of calendar throughout the year. In March the emu starts to appear in the evening skies, and in the next few months it appears vertically. During this time it is seen to be a female emu running. This time of the year is the breeding season for emus, and the female emus will run in a circle around a male to attract him. This is an important time of the year because once the emus lay their eggs in May and June, the Euahlayi will collect them. These eggs are among the most nutritious food sources available in the area, each one weighing about a pound. Once the egg is laid it is guarded by a male emu. Consequently, from June to August, the emu constellation now appears horizontally high in the sky and is perceived to be a male emu roosting on the nest. To collect the eggs, the Euahlayi will use an emu caller which is a kind of short didgeridoo. By hitting it with their hand, the emu caller makes a sound that resembles a male emu. This then lures out the male emu who is guarding the nest and with the male emu distracted, another person can sneak into the nest and collect the egg. From August to September the celestial emu is now starting to be seen to be more vertical lower on the sky. Now the male emu is getting up from the nest and starting to rear the chicks. Consequently, this is the time that the Euahlayi perform their initiation rites. Finally, by October and November, the emu is low on the eastern horizon at sunset. It looks as though it is upside down with its bottom in the air. This is perceived to be the emu sitting in a waterhole. At this time of the year summer is approaching and it is getting hotter. But there is typically rain during these months so the emus will get relief in waterholes.

Well, another indication of the observational prowess of the Aboriginal Australians is that there some rather intriguing evidence that a number of groups recognized the existence of variable stars. In the West, stellar variability wasn’t conclusively proven until the 1840s by John Herschel, about whom we will no doubt talk much more about in a future episode in a decade or two. But there are a number of stories among the peoples of Kokatha Country in the Great Victoria Desert, which are suggestive of this phenomenon.

A representative version of the story goes like this. There is a hunter named Nyeeruna who appears in the sky as the constellation Orion. Like the story I mentioned from the Yamaji, Nyeeruna chases a group of sisters who form the Pleiades. But Kambugudha, the eldest sister of the family, stands between Nyeeruna and her sisters and forms the Hyades star cluster. She knows that despite his bluster, Nyeeruna is really a coward and she taunts him by putting a row of dingo puppies between him and the Pleiades because she knows he is too chicken to come near the dingo puppies. This row of puppies forms the arc of Orion’s shield. Nyeeruna becomes angry at this insult, so he begins a magic incantation and produces fire in his club, represented by the star Betelgeuse. This fire grows bright, and the sisters then become afraid of Nyeeruna and turn into lizards to escape and hide. Their sister Kambugudha then defends herself by producing fire in her left foot, represented by the star Aldebaran and kicks the fire toward him. At this Nyeeruna becomes scared and his fire disappears. But soon enough he works up his courage and begins to pursue the sisters once again. The fire in his right hand increases, but now Kambugudha sics the father dingo on Nyeeruna. As he runs away scared, his fire dissipates and Kambugudha laughs at him and points her fiery foot at him.

Well, the description of the stars Betelgeuse and Aldebaran in this story alternately growing and fading in brightness with the fortunes of Nyeeruna and Kambugudha in their cosmic skirmish is borne out by their actual luminosity. Both of these stars are variable. Over a period of around 400 days, Betelgeuse changes from 0th magnitude to about magnitude 1.6, which roughly corresponds to a change in flux by a factor of 4. For a careful observer, noticing a change in brightness of this magnitude is not overly difficult. This can be done by comparing the star against other nearby bright stars and noticing that sometimes it appears to be brighter than some other star, and other times appears to be fainter. What is more impressive is that the story appears to have recognized that Aldebaran is also variable. Aldebaran is indeed a variable star, but the range of variation is much less, only about 2/10ths of a magnitude, or roughly a 20% change in flux. This is just barely above the edge of human ability to resolve differences in brightness. And to make it even more impressive, Aldebaran’s brightness varies quite irregularly. Incidentally, the detail in the story of the Pleiades turning into lizards is due to the fact that they rise in the evening sky in December which is when the lizard eggs begin hatching.

There’s also another story that seems to reflect stellar variability, this one from the Coorong people of South Australia. In this story, a long time ago there was a man named Waiyungari. Or, more precisely, Waiyungari was almost a man, but not quite, because he was in the process of going through initiation, called kaindjani. During this intense period of initiation he is in a state of “ngarambi,” which is a kind of sacred state during which he goes through a mortification of the body. The initiate fasts and wears no clothing. He instead covers his body with red ochre. In fact, the man’s name in this story, Waiyungari, literally means “red man.” And what’s more, during this time, the initiate is to have no contact with women. Well, one day during his initiation, Waiyungari was thirsty. He came upon a stream and he bent over and drank the water from the stream with a reed. As he was drinking, some of the red ochre on his body fell off and floated downstream where it passed by two women. The two women noticed the red ochre and went upstream whereupon they saw Waiyungari in all his naked glory. The two women began to lust after him and they secretly followed him. When Waiyungari retired in his camp for the night, the women turned themselves into emus and brayed to catch his attention. Waiyungari went outside to hunt what he thought were the emus, but then the two women returned back to their human form. They threw themselves on him and asked to make love which Waiyungari agreed to. In doing this, Waiyungari violated the sacred initiation taboo. And to make matters worse, these two women were the wives of his older brother, Nepeli. And, to make things even worse, Waiyungari’s mother caught him in the act and informed Nepeli. As Waiyungari and the two women slept in his hut, Nepeli set it on fire. The three were able to escape, and Waiyungari tied a rope to a spear and threw it up into the Milky Way and then pulled himself and the two women up into the sky. Waiyungari became Antares and the two women flank him as Tau Scorpii and Sigma Scorpii. From time to time Waiyungari’s lusts flare up and he gets brighter and this acts as a reminder to the initiates not to violate the sacred initiation law. And indeed, Antares is a variable star, changing in brightness by about 1 magnitude, or around a factor of 2.5 in flux over the course of four and a half years.

Well, the last thing I’ll mention is the idea of a songline, or a “dreaming track.” Throughout this episode I’ve been saying things like “the Boorong people of Northwest Victoria,” or the Wardaman people of Northern Australia. But these groups would move from place to place and groups of them could traverse vast distances, in some cases most of the way across the continent. Given how inhospitable much of this land is, the songlines were a kind of navigational technique that would allow them to make long journeys safely and guide them to their destination. The songline would be a set of songs, dances, and stories and these would embed important landmarks and waypoints for a particular route across the continent. When I described how Banumbirr, the creator spirit of the Yolŋu people, led the people to the island of the dead by flying overhead and describing the path below, she was singing a songline. By understanding the songline, a traveller would know which mountains or rock formations to look out for, where to turn, where watering holes were, and so on. The songlines were not in one language, but would change throughout to match the language of the locals of the land it was describing at that point in the songline. This would then act as a kind of passport when they entered foreign lands. When they encountered members of another group who spoke in another language, they could sing to them in that people’s own language, even if they themselves did not understand exactly what they were singing. To further aid navigation, the songlines were matched up onto the stars, so that by tracing a path in the sky, you would approximately be able to reconstruct the contours of your journey. And many of these celestial paths have in fact been turned into concrete paths in the modern day. Early Australian settlements tended to form along waypoints of a songline, and over time towns grew around them. When these towns were connected by modern highways, they more or less trace the paths of the original songline.

Well, this episode is running somewhat late, so I will have to leave things here. In the next episode we will stay in Oceania, but we will turn our attention further out to sea and start to look at the astronomy of Polynesia and how it enabled the Polynesian people to navigate to islands halfway across the globe. I hope you’ll join me then. Until the next full moon, good night and clear skies.

Additional references

• Hamacher, The First Astronomers