Robert S Fuller

This article presents an analysis of an Aboriginal songline in south-eastern Australia that has not been previously recorded. As part of a project examining the astronomy and songline connections of the Saltwater Aboriginal peoples of the New South Wales coast, the Black Duck Songline was identified that may have links to the Pleiades star cluster. The Pleiades, known by many peoples as the Seven Sisters, is one of the most important elements of Aboriginal cosmologies across Australia, and features in songlines and oral traditions, as well as being a resource calendar identifier. Aboriginal songlines are a unique development of Aboriginal culture that celebrate the travels of the Creator Ancestors as they shaped the very landscape. The identification of the Black Duck Songline and its possible connection to the Pleiades is an example of the potential reawakening of other long-distance songlines in Australia and their connection to the cosmology of their communities.

Australian Aboriginal peoples, who arrived in what is now the Australian continent approximately 65,000 years ago, are now accepted as the modern peoples with the longest continuous culture on Earth. Their culture, which includes observational astronomy, has a strong connection to the night sky, which is represented in Aboriginal stories and traditional knowledge.  The Aboriginal belief in ‘Country’, their connection to the land they have lived upon, extends to the songlines that crisscross Australia, and these songlines may be a means to encode memory of stories and resource management.  Recent evidence points to the remarkable accuracy in such stories describing sea level rise from over 7000 years ago.
In this study I examined the stories and knowledge of the Aboriginal peoples of the New South Wales coast (‘Saltwater’ peoples) through a historical archival study of available literature, and through ethnographic fieldwork with knowledge holders from over 20 communities. The resulting database included more than 200 literature and 300 ethnographic items, including stories, vocabulary and cultural knowledge. I analysed the data using a number of anthropological theoretical approaches, including a thematic analysis resulting in a ‘thick description’, and in a structuralist approach to create ‘mythemes’ which were subsequently analysed using a phylogenetic technique to determine connections between cultural stories and their possible transmission along songlines.
Included in the study is a review of the history of the arrival of Australian Aboriginal peoples to Australia and what is known about their settling of the NSW coast.  I further studied the history of Western knowledge of songlines and defined them for the purpose of this study, then described many local, and several long-distance songlines encountered in the area of the study.
In this study, I have used a multi-disciplinary approach including anthropology, cultural astronomy, and the Western sciences of astronomy, archaeology and geography to describe the culture of the Aboriginal peoples of the area of this study.  The results have shown a strong connection in culture up and down the NSW coast, and suggested connections which may point to the transmission of stories along the songlines described.

The Kamilaroi and Euahlayi peoples and their neighbours, the Ngemba and Murrawarri, are a
large Australian Aboriginal cultural grouping located in the north central and northwest of
New South Wales. They have a rich history in the literature on culture and language, but
have been neglected when the cultural astronomy of Australian Indigenous groups has been
reported. This study examined the literature for detailed knowledge of the sky, and collected
stories from Aboriginal people of these language groups who practice their culture.
Combined, this knowledge was used to create a database to add to the larger body of
knowledge on cultural astronomy in Australia. Specific detailed knowledge on the Emu in
the Sky, and the use of star maps to teach travel to ceremony, was analysed and reported,
along with the larger collection of knowledge, in journal articles that form the basis of this
thesis by publication. The hypotheses that this cultural grouping has a rich cultural astronomy,
and some of this knowledge was ethnoscientific in nature, were answered in the affirmative
through an analysis of the collected data and stories. The results of this study point to a
number of new areas of potential research in Aboriginal cultural astronomy.

The Euahlayi people are an Aboriginal Australian language group located in north-central New South Wales and south-central Queensland. They have a rich culture of astronomy and use of the night sky in resource management. Like several other Aboriginal peoples, they did not travel extensively at night, and so were assumed not to use the night sky for navigation. This study has confirmed that they, like most other Aboriginal groups, travelled extensively outside their own country for purposes of trade and ceremonies. We also found previously unpublished evidence that they used „star maps‟ in the night sky for learning and remembering waypoints along their routes of travel, but not for actual navigation.

This paper presents a detailed study of the knowledge of the Kamilaroi and Euahlayi peoples about the „Emu in the Sky‟. This study was done with ethnographic data that was not previously reported in detail. We surveyed the literature to find that there are widespread reports of an „Emu in the Sky‟ across Aboriginal Australian language groups, but little detailed knowledge available in the literature. This paper reports and describes a comprehensive Kamilaroi and Euahlayi knowledge of the Emu in the Sky and its cultural context.

Ethnographic evidence indicates that bora (initiation)
ceremonial sites in southeast Australia, which typically
comprise a pair of circles connected by a pathway, are
symbolically reflected in the Milky Way as the ‘Sky Bora’.
This evidence also indicates that the position of the Sky
Bora signifies the time of year when initiation ceremonies
are held. We use archaeological data to test the hypothesis
that southeast Australian bora grounds have a preferred
orientation to the position of the Milky Way in the night sky in
August, when the plane of the galaxy from Crux to Sagittarius
is roughly vertical in the evening sky to the south-southwest.
We accomplish this by measuring the orientations of 68 bora
grounds using a combination of data from the archaeological
literature, and site cards in the New South Wales Aboriginal
Heritage Information Management System database. We find
that bora grounds have a preferred orientation to the south
and southwest, consistent with the Sky Bora hypothesis.
Monte Carlo statistics show that these preferences were not
the result of chance alignments, but were deliberate.

We test the hypothesis that Aboriginal linear stone
arrangements in New South Wales are oriented along cardinal
directions. We accomplish this by measuring the azimuths of
stone arrangements described on site cards held in the New
South Wales Aboriginal Heritage Information Management
System. We find a preference recorded on the site cards for
cardinal orientations among azimuths. We then survey a
subset of these sites to test the accuracy of the information
recorded on the site cards. The field surveys show that the
site cards are reasonably accurate, but the surveyors probably
did not correct for magnetic declinations. Using Monte Carlo
statistics, we show that these preferred orientations did not
occur by chance and that Aboriginal people deliberately
aligned these arrangements to the approximate cardinal
directions. We briefly explore possible reasons for these
preferred orientations and highlight the need for future work

We present results of a preliminary study of the astronomical knowledge and traditions of the seven major Aboriginal language groups in the Sydney Basin. We establish a basic dataset of oral traditions (stories), vocabulary, and examples of cultural heritage relating to astronomical traditions laying the foundation for further study. Using a combination of primarily ethno-historical documents and material culture, with preliminary ethnographic work with two consultants, we explore the relationship between Aboriginal astronomical knowledge and cultural traditions, cosmology, natural resources, calendar development, law, ceremony, and material traditions. We conduct a thematic analysis of the collected information and place this within a larger framework of comparative analysis with other Aboriginal communities in southeastern Australia in general. Warning to Aboriginal Readers: This paper contains the names of Aboriginal people who have passed away and references to cultural subjects that may not be appropriate for the reader.

The Euahlayi people are an Australian Aboriginal language group located in north-central New South Wales and south-central Queensland. They have a rich culture of astronomy, and use of the night sky in resource management. Like several other Aboriginal peoples, they did not travel extensively at night, and so were assumed not to use the night sky for navigation. This study has confirmed that they, like most other Aboriginal groups, travelled extensively outside their own country for purposes of trade and ceremonies. We also found that, previously unknown, they used star maps in the night sky for learning and remembering waypoints along their routes of travel, but not for actual navigation. Further research may find that this was common to many Aboriginal groups in Australia.

We investigate an Australian Aboriginal cultural story that seems to describe an extraordinary series of astronomical events occurring at the same time. We hypothesise that this was a witnessed natural event and explore natural phenomena that could account for the description. We select a thunderstorm, total solar eclipse, and strong Aurora Australis as the most likely candidates, then conclude a plausible date of 764 CE. We evaluate the different factors that would determine whether all these events could have been visible, include meteorological data, alternative total solar eclipse dates, solar activity cycles, aurorae appearances, and sky brightness during total solar eclipses. We conduct this study as a test-case for rigorously and systematically examining descriptions of rare natural phenomena in oral traditions, highlighting the difficulties and challenges with interpreting this type of hypothesis.

A major focus of the archaeoastronomical research conducted around the world focuses on understanding how ancient cultures observed sunrise and sunset points along the horizon, particularly at the solstices and equinoxes. Scholars argue that observations of these solar points are useful for developing calendars, informing ritual/ceremonial practices, and predicting seasonal change. This is the foundation of the Eurocentric four-season Julian (and later Gregorian) calendar. Famous examples include Stonehenge, Newgrange, Chichen Itza, and Chankillo. Studies at these and other sites tend to focus on solar point observations through alignments in stone arrangements, and the orientations of monuments. Despite the ongoing study of Indigenous Knowledge in Australia revealing a wealth of information about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander observations and interpretations of solar, lunar, and stellar properties and motions, very little has been published about the importance and use of s...

The Kamilaroi people and their neighbours, the Euahlayi, Ngemba, and Murrawarri, are an Aboriginal cultural grouping located in the northwest and north central of New South Wales. They have a rich history, but have been missed in much of the literature concerned with sky knowledge in culture. This study collected stories, some of which have not previously been reported in an academic format, from Aboriginal people practicing their culture, augmented with stories from the literature, and analysed the data to create a database of sky knowledge that will be added to the larger body of Aboriginal cultural knowledge in Australia. We found that there is a strong sky culture reflected in the stories, and we also explored the stories for evidence of an ethnoscientific approach to knowledge of the sky.

The Kamilaroi people and their neighbours, the Euahlayi, Ngemba and Murrawarri, are an Aboriginal cultural grouping located in north-west and north central New South Wales. They have a rich history, but have been missed in much of the literature concerning sky knowledge in culture. This study collected stories, some not previously reported in an academic format, from Aboriginal people practising their culture, augmented with stories from the literature, and analysed the data to create a database of sky knowledge that will be added to the larger body of Aboriginal cultural knowledge in Australia. We found that there is a strong sky culture reflected in the stories, and we explored the stories for evidence of an ethnoscientific approach to knowledge of the sky.

Ethnographic evidence indicates that bora (initiation) ceremonial sites in southeast Australia, which typically comprise a pair of circles connected by a pathway, are symbolically reflected in the Milky Way as the 'Sky Bora'. This evidence also indicates that the position of the Sky Bora signifies the time of the year when initiation ceremonies are held. We use archaeological data to test the hypothesis that southeast Australian bora grounds have a preferred orientation to the position of the Milky Way in the night sky in August, when the plane of the galaxy from Crux to Sagittarius is roughly vertical in the evening sky to the south-southwest. We accomplish this by measuring the orientations of 68 bora grounds using a combination of data from the archaeological literature and site cards in the New South Wales Aboriginal Heritage Information Management System database. We find that bora grounds have a preferred orientation to the south and southwest, consistent with the Sky Bora hypothesis. Monte Carlo statistics show that these preferences were not the result of chance alignments, but were deliberate.