Week 1

What do science and songlines have in common?

learning intentions

I can understand and appreciate the significance of Aboriginal astronomy in Australian culture
I have explored traditional Aboriginal knowledge of celestial bodies and seasonal knowledge and their connections to land, seasons, and stories.

Tasks

Knowledge & understanding

TASK 1: Emu in the Sky Student activity - Google Classrooms

Literacy & research

TASK 2: Indigenous weather knowledge information organiser
Task 3: Investigating interpretations of stellar scintillation

Knowledge and understanding

Aboriginal Astronomy

In Australia, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are recognised as the first astronomers. Among other things, they use their knowledge of the night sky for food gathering and navigation purposes. However, instead of focusing on the position of the stars to form the constellations, Aboriginal astronomy focuses on the whole of the sky, including the dark patches between the stars. They see the connections between the sky and the land, viewing them as one entity (Steffens, M. 2009).

In Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures, everything on the land is reflected in the sky.

The sky serves as a scientific textbook, a map, a law book, and a canvas on which complex layers of knowledge are interwoven, linked, and recorded for future generations. The Sun, Moon, and stars encapsulate narratives about social order, seasonal change, the behaviour of plants and animals, navigation, kinship, and spirituality.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures have their own astronomers – people who carefully watch the positions of all the celestial objects to inform the community about food economics, ceremony, and travel. In the western Torres Strait, they are called Zugubau Mabaig, meaning “Star Man”. These astronomers carefully observe the positions and properties of the stars to inform a rich corpus of knowledge, a phrase many elders call “Reading the Stars”.

By working closely with scientists, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander elders are sharing their traditional knowledge. It is through oral tradition (story, song, dance) that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been able to pass down the collective, growing, and evolving wisdom and knowledge for thousands of years. This has revealed a wealth of information about the power of oral tradition, demonstrating oral histories can describe natural events dating back over 10,000 years, showing its resilience in the face of natural disasters, climate change, and ongoing colonisation.

Each language group has its own cultural stories that speak of their local environment. The Emu in the Sky is one story that is familiar to many Aboriginal communities across Australia and relates to a particular constellation. As shown in our video the Emu in the Sky, the shape of the emu is formed from the dark patches in the Milky Way and almost stretches across the whole sky.

Read one of the stories of the Emu in the Sky , Chapter 5 in Star Stories of the Dreaming, compiled by the Kamilaroi, Euahlayi People and their neighbours, Murrawarri, Ngemba. These First Nations People are located in north central and northwest NSW, however the story repeats for many language groups across Australia.

Listen to the story of The Emu in the Sky, as told by Ben Flick, an Aboriginal man from the Kamilaroi language group of north-western New South Wales and also Wiradjuri Man Mark.

Kirsten Banks, Australian astrophysicist, science communicator and proud Wiradjuri Woman, discusses her experience of The Emu and how it inspired her to learn more about Aboriginal astronomy.

The Emu in the Sky orientation

The image on the left is of the night sky in July. Can you see the Emu in the Sky constellation? Trace over the shape of the emu, remembering that the dark spaces are important in forming the shape of the emu.

With the movement of the Earth, the position of the Emu in the Sky changes throughout the night and through the year. Locate images of the Milky Way in April, July, November and January. Trace the emu over each of these images. Australian Indigenous Astronomy has an excellent blogspot describing this phenomenon.

task 1: complete Emu in the sky on google classrooms

BIG HINT: COMPLETE THE BIBLIOGRAPHY RIGHT AT THE END - THIS WILL HELP YOU IN YOUR SUMMATIVE ASSIGNMENT

Literacy & research

Astronomy was used by indigenous people to develop calendars and navigate the land. Each group lived according to an annual cycle, which informed what they ate and hunted and where they travelled

The four seasons we are all familiar with, spring, summer, autumn, winter might well apply half way across the world, but almost wherever you go on this continent, you know there’s something different going on, whether you’re in Melbourne or Alice Springs, cyclone prone Port Headland or Darwin in the wet season. In fact anyone who’s spent time in Canberra knows why they say it has ‘four seasons in one day’! However, there’s nothing crazy about Canberra's weather, no matter how often people cry out, “It’s supposed to be summer!” In fact Canberra experiences up to 8 periodic seasons in any given year. Seasons can be looked at in a number of ways. They can indicate weather patterns such as winter, or the wet season, seasonal events and activities that happen at particular times of the year like holiday seasons, hunting seasons or emu-egg time, and seasonal change is signalled through plants, animals and other signs such as the night sky. Passed on through generations, knowledge about when to collect or hunt for food, when to prepare for the cold or rain, to trap eels for food and trade, or to collect emu eggs before the chicks are formed, is intricately tied to knowing about and feeling, country, place and ultimately connection to it.

Literacy & research

Task 2: Indigenous weather knowledge information organiser

Click on the Indigenous Weather Knowledge image to the left to open the website in a new tab.

Investigate the seasonal calendar of one of these communities and fill out the information organiser in Google Classrooms

Again, this resource might be useful to you in your assignment - if you use it remember to put it in your bibliography.

Task 3: Twinkle twinkle - stellar scintillation

Make notes on the padlet below from two different interpretations of stellar scintillation (or twinkling stars). Put your name on the post!

a) what is the science that is being described in the song

b) how does this science help us solve a problem (e.g. distinguish stars from planets, predict a wind)

c) how does society use this knowledge

The Torres Strait Islanders who use the stars to predict weatherTraditional stories in songs show how Indigenous people on Murray Island observe the features of twinkling stars to predict weather and changes in season.

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