There's a new generation of indigenous people who are building bridges between science and traditional knowledge, says an expert of cultural astronomy.
Associate professor of cultural astronomy at the University of Melbourne, Duane Hamacher, specialises in the intersection of astronomy with culture, heritage, history, and society. His book The First Astronomers - How Indigenous Elders Read the Stars,has input from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander elders.
Duane Hamacher Photo: supplied by Harper Collins NZ
It looks at very early astronomy and catalogues the wealth of information that First People around the world have held about planets and stars throughout history.
Hamacher tells Nine to Noon early settlers were expert observers of the stars, used astronomy in so many aspects of their lives, and there's so much we can learn from them.
“First cultures around the world have had complex knowledge about the stars for millennia and over the years it’s been said indigenous knowledge didn’t have any science," he says.
“This book really challenges that idea and it sets forth, in a systematic way, all the different ways in which complex science is woven into these ancient traditions.
“So, I’ve written this book with six aboriginal elders to look into the science behind this. But I’ve also been working and collaborating with First Nation elders from around the world, including in Aotearoa New Zealand.”
His background in astrophysics has given him an eye to understanding the science behind what those elders taught, they were a people of culture but also of science, he says.
“That’s one of the main motivations behind all of this work and I think having the eye of an astronomer and an astrophysicist enabled me to be able to bring these two worlds together in such a way as to teach the public that these old systems have a science and the idea that they don’t is something we can consign to history.”
He has examples of aboriginal traditions in his book that go back over 10,000 years.
“An example of that would be in Tasmania where there are Tasmanian aboriginal traditions recorded in the 1840s that describe the land bridge that used to connect Tasmania to the mainland at the same time that the star Canopus, the second-brightest star in the sky was very close to the south celestial pole. It didn’t really move much, it stayed pretty stationery. And both of those things occurred about 12 to 13,000 years' ago.”
Hamacher says there are also oral traditions about meteorite impacts, and supernova and various stars that can be extended back in time thousands of years.
“There’s a great example here in the deserts of central Australia where you have the Henbury meteorite craters. This is a field of about 16 impact craters that were formed by a small asteroid that came burrowing into the Earth’s atmosphere.
"The pressure from the Earth’s atmosphere broke it up and all these fragments hit the ground, creating these 15, 16 craters, ranging from about 10 metres in diameter to over 180 metres in diameter and in the aboriginal traditions that have been passed down they talk about a fire devil running down from the sun, hitting the ground and setting the ground on fire, creating the big holes.
“And the people found that place to be a sorry place, taboo, even though a local creek would empty into one of the craters, so whenever it rained it would fill up with water, the people said we don’t really go there and collect water from that because if we do we fire the fire devil is going to fill it with iron again. Of course this is an iron meteorite that fell. Geologists about 100 years ago where able to date this meteorite crater to over 4500 years.”
Gosses Bluff is another structure,an eroded remnant of an impact crater formed 142 million years ago, near the centre of Australia, about 175km west of Alice Springs.
Indigenous people have a myth about the meteorite being a child that fell from the cradle of the Milky Way, which created the 20km diameter ring-shape structure. The parents – the morning and evening star - they said, took turns looking for the child.
“The indigenous and Western explanations for this are remarkably similar, because in Western science this is a giant meteorite impact crater," he says.
“It was really fantastic to learn about this knowledge from one of the traditional custodians Warren Williams.”
Hamacher has also collaborated with Māori experts in New Zealand, drawing from rich material collected over many years given to Rangiānehu Mātāmua, a New Zealand indigenous studies and Māori cultural astronomy academic who lectures at University of Waikato. He is of Tūhoe descent.
“I’ve been primarily working with Professor Rangi Mātāmua, who is a Māori astronomer and one of the main figures behind getting Matariki recognised as a national holiday. Professor Mātāmua has a very close family connection because it was his great grandfather and his father who actually wrote a manuscript over 400 pages containing 1000 star names all in the Māori language that was passed down to multiple generations and given to Rangi back in the 1990s. So since then he’s been working to have all this knowledge shared with the public.
“He’s written quite a bit about these phenomenal levels of star knowledge that about the solstices, how Tamanuiterā the sun stays with one wife during the winter, which is represented by the star Sarious and another wife during the summer, and the sun moves back and forth across the horizon throughout the year, reaching the solstice points, which is the Māori language sets the turning point of the sun.”
Indigenous treatment of the moon is something that Hamacher also admires.
“What I love about Māori and other Polynesian traditions about the moon is there is a unique name for every single day of the lunar month – so there’s 30 different names for the moon during that cycle. That’s something that you find in other First Nation traditions around the world,” he says.
He says his study of indigenous knowledge has enhanced his own scientific understanding of the world. Other scientists have had similar experiences.
"Scientists are finally starting to listen to a lot of the elders and First Nation traditions, about things that they’ve been talking about for a long time but they have never really given much thought.
“One of them is the link between Arora and sound. As it turns out Arora can actually cause crackling sounds and it wasn’t until a few years ago that scientists in Finland worked out how and why this occurs.
"There are examples of aboriginal cultures in Australia observing the slow-changing in brightness of some of the bright stars like Betelgeuse and Antares and over a time-scale of a few years in some cases, the elders talk about these stars brightening and fading over these long periods of time.
“This is something that wasn’t known to Western science until the mid-1800s. Around this time these traditions were being recorded about these stars changing in brightness, so scientists had just looked at these traditions as scientific texts, instead of just seeing them as myths and legends, they would have been able to figure a lot of this stuff out a lot sooner.
“So, I think the idea to remember is indigenous ways of knowing and Western ways of knowing is quite different, but it is an area where they cross over and in particular, when trying to understand the world around us, which is science.”
Indigenous elders too are being shaped by their exposure to the Western scientific method.
He says science in an indigenous context is very holistic and there’s a renewed focus on seeing the world through Western eyes, but using science as a lens and finding the mutual ground between them that can benefit all through innovation.
“Everything is connected, so you have to look at how everything is linked together. It also has to have a personal meaning to it. This is one of the areas where indigenous and Western science diverge. Western science rejected what they called supernatural causation and that’s fine for the questions that science is trying to ask.
“But for First Nations and indigenous peoples around the world they’re asking different questions. They’re still observing, they’re still trying to figure out how things work and they’re still making sense and applying that knowledge."
