Consulting the world's first astronomers for knowledge of science and law that has sustained the planet's longest enduring civilisation.
Australia's Aborigines were the world's first astronomers. Our astronomy systems and knowledge were the most extensive of any culture on earth prior to the invention of the telescope. Our ancestors accurately observed and recorded even the most inconspicuous fourth-magnitude stars, both in oral texts and visual diagrams.
In one language group I know of, the eldest Aunty of a woman draws a chart, on bark, of the stars at the birth of the woman's baby, indicating when she should choose to conceive her next child. I don't know much detail about this, as it is women's business, but I have been assured that the charts are very sophisticated by any "modern" standards.
Study of Aboriginal oral texts that are usually dismissed as "legends" or "myths" reveal that our ancestors understood that the world was round, tens of thousands of years ago. This was a fact that Europeans only discovered a few hundred years ago (and then they arrested the fella who told them, along with anyone else who tried to talk about it!)
In many Indigenous cultures constellations are not only based on the shapes made by the stars themselves, but on the shapes made by the spaces between them. Have you ever noticed the Emu in the Milky Way? (see picture)
The positions of these constellations and individual stars were used by our ancestors in the forecast of long-range weather patterns, and also in the contriving of complex seasonal calendars. European colonists brought their own primitive calendar and seasonal concepts here, and have not seemed to notice that these do not fit with the rhythms of our landscape. Instead they seem to blame the land itself for their inability to understand and utilise it, calling it "harsh", "cruel" and "unpredictable".
In different places I have lived on this continent the seasons have numbered as many as eight, and as few as five. Indigenous astrological calendars mark these annual changes in the land, patterns that have long been ignored by invaders trying to impose their simplistic "four seasons" model. The colonists have even planted foreign deciduous trees (weeds) everywhere to give the illusion of a European Autumn, which would be almost funny if it weren't so destructive.
This kind of ignorance, arrogance, selfishness and destruction was held in check for millennia by our oral astrological texts, which are generally narrative-based and warn of the consequences for such wrong-doing. So the stars were not only a reference for Indigenous science, but Indigenous Law as well. Once everybody knew the Law from the stories told about the characters in the stars. Everybody understood the consequences of greed, ignorance, disrespect, destruction and sacrelige, because they were written right there in the sky over their heads.
The colonists only have constantly shifting laws on temporary bits of paper. How can a "civilisation" be built to last on such a flimsy thing? Maybe it's time for everybody to look to the stars again.
Read about Aboriginal Cosmology.
