Carlleen Dingo’s earliest memories are of looking up at the inky black skies above Australia’s north-west coastline, awash with planets, stars and galaxies. Geraldton, or Jambinu, is a coastal town 400 kilometres north of Perth, known for its wildflowers, red earth, fierce winds and undulating sandy dunes.
But at night, there’s another world on display.
The Yamaji-Wajarri people have looked to the skies for thousands of years as a teacher and a guide.
“At night-time, living out in the bush, [I] always sat around the fire and looked up, looking at the embers flicking in the air. There’s a sky full of stars.
“You get curious and you watch, and then you watch them move. And when you move to different places on country, you try and look for them stars and pin them down.”
Growing up, Dingo heard the stories from her grandmothers about how her ancestors would travel and hunt by reading the skies.
Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email“Pops used to point out: ‘Oh, that star there, that’s the Milky Way’… you understand how the travellers travelled back in the day by using the stars and going through country at night.”
That relationship is explored in a global exhibition showcasing how Indigenous artists from Australia and South Africa see the night sky. The exhibition, called Cosmic Echoes: A shared sky has toured Africa and Europe before coming back to Australia.
Dingo is one of the artists involved. She says the scale of the exhibition began to sink in when she followed her paintings journey from her Geraldton home across the Indian Ocean. “I got told that my painting was going to go on a tour going to Africa,” she says. “Then it went to Manchester and Luxembourg in Europe and I was like: ‘Well, all right then!’”
Linked by the stars
About 300 kilometres inland from Geraldton, the arid red earth is punctured by native grasses, spinifex, and saltbush, and bursting wildflowers that spring up after the rains. This isolated and sparsely populated region is home to one of the largest satellites and radio telescopes in the world.
Dr Douglas Bock, director of the CSIRO’s space and astronomy unit, says the Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, or Murchison radio-astronomy observatory, on Wajarri country is the result of a decades long relationship between the agency and the Wajarri Yamaji Aboriginal Corporation.
“We’ve been working now in this area, I think, for around 20 years,” he says. “That was when we first started looking at this place and seeing the Murchison region as one of the best places in the world to do astronomy.”
It hosts the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) observatory’s SKA-Low telescope. An array of 131,072 two-metre tall antennas resembling metal Christmas trees, spread across 74 kilometres, working as one telescope. The technology maps distant galaxies, cosmic magnetic fields and black holes.
Prof Jessica Dempsey has also looked up at the skies for as long as she can remember. The radio astronomer and director-general of the SKA observatory says the exhibition is an artistic exploration of science, technology and astronomy spanning two continents.
“We can only learn more by sharing the stories and the ways of looking at the world across these different communities,” Dempsey says.
The SKA observatory is also building a mid-frequency telescope in South Africa’s arid Karoo region, the SKA-Mid telescope, comprising of 196 dish antennas, each standing almost 15 metres tall.
For South African artist Junior Oliphant, a First Nations person who grew up in a coloured town still grappling with the brutal and racist impacts of colonial rule and apartheid, identity is complex.
“In South Africa, we take pride in the word ‘coloured’, but for me it’s also complicated,” Oliphant says. “I’d like to believe that my ancestry is Khoisan, but it isn’t something I can just claim. I don’t have the elders’ guidance or mentorship to find out who I am or where I’m coming from. So the question of ‘who am I, where do I come from’ is a question I’m asking through my paintings.”
His painting in the exhibition depicts Dr Katrina Esau, or Ouma Katrina, a traditional language speaker and fierce advocate. He was then able to meet her at the Cape Town opening of the exhibition.
“Ouma Katrina is the last living N|uu speaker in the world. She’s like the last living link between a lost culture and a lost language,” he says.
Oliphant has now travelled to Geraldton for the Australian opening of the exhibition, and speaks about the ways Indigenous cultures in the southern hemisphere are connected through time and space by stories about the Milky Way. In Khoisan folklore, he says, “there was this girl who was kept in a cage, and she cried out until the cage exploded. The ashes flew into the sky and that is how the Milky Way was created.”
“The Khoisan in South Africa used the stars like compasses – to guide when to move, when new plants would come, when seasons changed,” Oliphant says. “With the Wajarri people, there are similarities in what they see in the stars too. Even though we are worlds apart, I feel like two different Aboriginal groups are connected under one star light.”
Dempsey says it took western technology centuries to catch up to the astronomical knowledge held by First Peoples. She gives the example of the Seven Sisters, also known as the Pleiades star cluster, which are found grouped together in the stories of many different cultures.
“One of the pieces of astronomy that all of our Indigenous family knew a long time ago is, how did they know they were sisters? All of these stories of these particular stars are a family, and so already in the story, they’e depicted by a lot of artists … as a family,” she says.
“It took us another several thousands of years before we had the technology to confirm that in a western science way.”
For Dingo, there is a deep sense of pride in knowing her people are recognised as the rightful hosts of some of the world’s most ambitious science and technology.
“As a little Yamatji running around that bush, I never ever thought that this would be available,” she says. “We’ve got the biggest satellites sitting out on country. That’s something to be proud of, because you always want to be the biggest and the best.”
• Cosmic Echoes: a Shared Sky Indigenous art exhibition opens in Geraldton on 23 July
