Opinion

Galaxies

Far away from the city lights when you look up into the night sky you can see a broad white band spread across the sky from one horizon to the other.

It is as if a farmer had thrown his bucket of milk across the sky.

This broad band of white consists of over 100 billion stars and is called the Milky Way galaxy.

It is our home galaxy – one of the most beautiful places to live in the universe.

In European mythology the Milky Way was formed from the milk that spurted out of the goddess Juno’s breast when the young Hercules sucks the milk from Juno’s breast.

His father Jupiter thought that his half-human son Hercules could become immortal if he drank Juno’s milk.

If you ever go to National Gallery in London you can see the famous painting called the Origin of the Milky Way by Tintoretto. The Milky Way has a different interpretation in Aboriginal society and culture.

The Aboriginal people have been watching this galaxy for thousands of years.

Over that time they have built up many stories about it and provided an explanation of its origin. To quite a number of Aboriginal people the Milky Way galaxy is a huge river in the sky where the spirits of their dead go and live. In the river there are fish, turtles, whales, water lily bulbs, etc on which the spirit people live as shown in the painting.

Others see the dark patches in the Milky Way as a huge emu in the sky which has spiritual significance for them.

In central Australia the Aranda and Luritja Aborigines see it as a river that divides the sky people into two groups.

All the stars to the east of this celestial river are said to be Aranda camps while all the stars to the west are Luritja camps.

This division in the sky serves as a reminder to the people on Earth that the division of lands amongst the Aboriginal people should be respected and adhered to on Earth.

This follows from their philosophical concept that states that the laws on the land are the same as those in the sky and vice-versa.

This concept was to play an important role in Australian social and political history in the 1990s in the case of land rights. I will discuss this in a future blog.

If you look carefully in the night sky you will be able to make out two fuzzy patches of light.

They represent the Magellanic Clouds. They attracted the attention of the Aboriginal people and they also have stories about these galaxies which are among the closest galaxies to us. To the Boorong people in Victoria the Magellanic Clouds are a male (the Large Cloud) and a female (the Small Cloud) native companion or two brolgas.

In north-east Australia they are seen as the camps of an old man (the Lage Magellanic Cloud) and an old woman (the Small Magellanic Cloud).

They are so feeble that the sky people gather water lily bulbs and catch the fish in the waters of the sky river and bring these to them to cook over a fire.

The camps of the old man and the woman are illustrated in the painting.

The fire in between them is the star Gamma Hydri. This story informs the Aboriginal people that they have to look after their old people, just as they do in the Asian countries to the north of Australia where the Aboriginal people migrated from to Australia over 40 000 to 60 000 years ago.

In desert regions the Magellanic Clouds have a different interpretation.

Here they are seen as two brothers who at the end of the creation period went up into the sky to live. The Kungara brothers watch over the Aboriginal people and punish or reward them according to their behaviour.

If a dying person has done good deeds the elder brother stops his younger brother from interfering with the spirit of the dead man.

However, if the dying person has been mean and dishonest or has lived an evil life the younger brother is allowed to take the spirit of the dead man to his camp fire.

The idea of rewarding or punishing human beings after death is very much similar to the ideas expressed in the great religions of the world, such as Christianity, Islam and Judaism.