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Little has been written in Aboriginal
astronomy. Stanbridge in 1857 (followed by MacPherson 1881)
briefly traced the night sky of Mallee country people in
Victoria. Dawson (1881) was followed by Howitt, Matthews,
Tindale, Elkin, the Berndts (and others like Massola and
Kemp-Smith) who also referred at times to the Aboriginal
night skies. Only Basedow (1925) and Mountford (1976) scrutinized
Aboriginal stories with specifics of astronomical phenomena
relating to them. John Morieson in the early 1990s began
checking Stanbridge with Aboriginal people (and publishing:1996-today).
Noni Sharp (1996) was the first to track Aboriginal night
sky songlines accurately (for island people), and the only
reference book on Aboriginal Astronomy was published by
Dianne Johnson in 1998. Ros Haynes has long used data from
Mornington Island art (notably in the 1996 C.U.P. history
of Australian astronomy), and the British Museum story of
‘pre-telescope’ astronomy (Walker 1996) also presents
proper awareness of indigenous astronomies. Interesting
astronomy had been noted in the 1950s by Bill’s father
W.E.Harney in settings that look like the Wardaman Creation
Story, and by C.H. Elkin (1976) to do with special material
in nearby land, but Dark Sparklers expresses its large range
for the first time. First details were pointed out to Hugh
Cairns and colleague Julie Drew in 1997, but the special
Yidumduma gestalten relating to the (Gaposchkin 1956-7)
nebulae only appeared in 1999. Overall, Yidumduma's astronomy
in Dark Sparklers gives understandings of indigenous spiritual
and intellectual worlds and detailed culture that are -
quite simply - new.
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NOW!
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