Aboriginal Astronomy
The Australian Aborigines were arguably the world’s first astronomers. Their complex systems of knowledge and beliefs about the heavenly bodies have evolved as an integral part of a culture that has been handed down through song, dance and ritual for some 40,000 years, predating by many millennia those of the Babylonians, the ancient Greeks, the Chinese, the Indians and the Incas. For the Aborigines, the stars not only evoked wonder; they also predicted and explained natural occurrences and provided celestial parallels with tribal experiences and behavioural codes.The Aborigines’ knowledge of the crowded southern sky was probably the most comprehensive possible for people dependent on the naked eye. They made accurate observations, not only of first and second order stars, but even of more inconspicuous fourth-magnitude stars, and in so doing devised a complex seasonal calendar based on the position of the constellations in the sky.
Aboriginal astronomy and its associated legends also had a purpose beyond the environment and collection of food. No less important to the preservation of the tribe as a cultural entity. This cultural entity was the organic relationship believed to exist between natural phenomena and social behaviour, and since many of the legends formulated to emphasise this connection involved the constellations, the night sky served as a periodic reminder of the moral lessons enshrined in the myths. Like the stained glass windows of medieval cathedrals, they provided in effect an illustrated textbook of morality and culture during the thousands of years when the only means of relaying the accumulated wisdom of the tribe was oral tradition.
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