Written by Carmelo Amalfi Wednesday, 18 November 2009 13:45
The 1998 WA artist of the year promotes the rich culture of the Bibbullmun people of south-western WA through Dreamtime stories explaining the origins and behaviour of objects in the sky.
On public display at Horizon as part of the International Year of Astronomy, Toogarr’s impressive canvas of stellar beings reflects a long tradition of stargazing that predates the arrival of European science in Australia.
Indigenous Australians have interpreted and used the night sky for tens of thousands of years. Whether they were the world’s first astronomers remains open to debate.
In Australia, the evidence suggests early Indigenous Australian people observed the stars and composed stories handed down by their ancestors through songs and dance and on bark paintings and rock walls.
The more accurately they knew the position and movement of the Sun, Moon and stars, the better they could predict when to hunt, harvest and call the tribes together.
Did they use the stars to navigate and find food? Did they consult the constellations where their ancestors camped? Did they move between land and sky?
Yes. Unfortunately, many of these oral traditions have been lost since European settlement in the late 18th century.
Indigenous Australian poet Kath Walker grew up on Stradbroke Island where she says she recognised a group of stars as ‘Mirabooka’ - a good man who was carried into the sky by the Great Spirit Father so he could look after his people.
She says when the Europeans came to Australia they changed the name of this group of stars to the Southern Cross.
“They not only stole our lands but also our sky.”
Objects in the sky were, and still are, associated with Dreamtime ‘dramas’ which deal with the values and morality of the community.
“The heavens, equally with the earth, are of the Dreamtime drama, where stars are allotted tribal classifications and are personified as mythological characters,” the late Perth Observatory honorary historian Muriel Utting, says in her 1991 ‘Windows to the Southern Skies’.
Utting quotes B.G. Maegraith, whose 1932 book, The Astronomy of the Aranda and Luritja tribes, described two great “camps” separated by the Milky Way, which is a great river or creek.
“The aborigine has gone beyond the stage of merely mapping out the stars into groups and painting fantastic stories in the sky,” Maegraith says.
“In a way, he may be said to have tried to analyse the physical features of the stars and to have noted such attributes as their motion and degree of magnitude.”
