Written by Carmelo Amalfi Wednesday, 18 November 2009 14:19
THE land and sky are one, according to Geraldton artist Charmaine Green.
She says the land and sky are connected in many ways which all connect back to the culture of Yamaji people.
“My mother and aunties taught us kids about the sky and how we can read it to tell us about bush tucker, especially when emu nesting time was near.
“Our families would then go out from Mullewa for the day. On these trips my mother’s brother (my uncle) would lead all us smaller kids and teach everyone (girls and boys) how to track the emu for eggs.
“As we got older we were expected to hand this information on through the generations.
“I paint to keep these stories alive and to remind everyone of the responsibilities we have in this changing world towards our cultural knowledge.”
The late Kimberley elder David Bungal Mowaljarlai, who during World War Two helped American forces find shot-down Japanese airmen and brought leprosy sufferers to Derby, has said everything is written twice - on the ground and in the sky.
Indigenous Australians made no measurements of space and time nor did they apply even the most basic mathematical calculations.
Though the sun and the feel of the wind were used for directions, the stars were not.
They almost universally represent totemic ancestral beings, with the knowledge of their existence passed on by the ‘old men’ of a tribe.
For Australia’s early stargazers, patterns were more important than brightness, often identifying a small cluster of obscure stars while ignoring more prominent stars.
South Australian astronomer Paul Curnow, who teaches ‘Australian starlore’, says Indigenous Australians used the night sky as a storyboard, reinforcing tribal laws and legends.
“Indigenous Australians prefer the term ‘Dreaming’ because the word ‘Dreamtime’ often implies a set time in the past, however, to Aboriginal people there is no set time in the Dreaming, it is an ongoing process,” he says.
The Dreaming exists in the present as well as the past, so that land, sky, animals, plants and humans are united spiritually through the presence of their stellar ancestors.
University of New South Wales English Professor Roslynn Haynes has found that traditional Indigenous Australian culture paid no attention to the two basic Western concepts of numeracy and temporality. They were not interested in positional astronomy as, “their understanding of the constellations was relational rather than mathematically based”.
For example, Venus is the sister of the sun and wife of Jupiter. Other groups call Venus the ‘Laughing Star’, an old man who once said something improper and has been laughing at his joke ever since.
Professor Haynes, author of ‘Explorers of the Southern Sky’, a history of Australian astronomy, says Indigenous Australians were, “as close to them (the stars) as the surrounding earthly environment”.
Modern astronomy has only one creation story of the universe, the Big Bang, while Indigenous Australians have many stories of how the universe formed.
The Wandjina figures of WA’s Kimberley region made the universe, including the fauna, the flora, the rain and the rivers, before they disappeared from the world, leaving an imprint of themselves on the walls of caves.
