The American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land that took place about sixty years ago was remarkable.
It was very successful in collecting objects from the natural environment and the human habitat in and around Yirrkala, Oenpelli and Umbakumba.
In addition to collecting 13 500 plant specimens, 30 000 fish, 850 birds, 460 animals, the collection also included 2 144 ethnographic artefacts including 484 bark paintings.
The leader of the expedition referred to Arnhem Land as Stone Age country. It was seen as the last frontier by members of the expedition although inroads into the culture and society of the Aboriginal people had already been made by an invading European culture.
The philosophy that guided the collections on the material culture of the Aboriginal people was driven by a Social Darwinist philosophy that held the view that Europeans were at the top of the evolutionary ladder.
The Aborigines were on the bottom rung of the ladder. This gave the culture vultures the right they felt of collecting anything they pleased of the culture and society of the Aboriginal people. The practice goes on even today. In fact, the people of Arnhem Land are the most interviewed, surveyed, probed and poked people in Australia.
The expedition lasted from May to November 1948 and in that period Charles Mountford, the leader of the expedition collected over 400 bark paintings that were to be dispersed to museums and art galleries after the expedition was over.
He paid pittance to the artists if he did pay them at all. No thought was given to the fact that some of these paintings may have had a collective story to tell and thus should have been kept together.
Amongst these were a group of about thirty-six paintings that had an astronomical theme. They represented the ideas and conceptions of pre-contact astronomy of the Aboriginal people.
Mountford informs us in his writings that he seldom suggested a subject for the paintings. However, when it came to paintings on astronomy he suggested the subjects. Thus the astronomical folklore was collected from a European perspective.
Not being an astronomer Mountford limited himself to celestial objects he was knowledgeable of. We find that the information that was collected by him of actual Aboriginal constellations was scanty and in most cases the provenance and the context of the paintings leaves much to be desired.
However, despite these shortcomings Mountford’s collection of Aboriginal paintings with an astronomical theme are the single largest visual collection of the astronomical beliefs of the Aboriginal people from Arnhem Land.
The paintings tell us about their beliefs about the Sun, the Moon, the Milky Way, the Magellanic Clouds, Orion the hunter, the Pleiades or the Seven Sisters, the Southern Cross and the stars. They also inform us that the Aboriginal people had developed a correlation between the appearance of certain stars with the seasons.
When the constellation Scorpio made its appearance in the sky the Aboriginal people in Yirrkala knew that the Macassan fishermen were coming to collect trepang, a delicacy in South-east Asian countries.
This practice was stopped by the Australian government with the introduction of the White Australia Policy in 1901.
The four stars that make a kite like pattern in the night sky was first seen by the Europeans only in the 16th century.
In fact, Andreas Corsali was the first European (on a voyage to Goa in India in 1572) to see it and name it the Southern Cross from his Christian perspective.
On the other hand the Aboriginal people have been watching this constellation for over 40 000 years.
The late Aboriginal poet, Kath Walker was scathing about the renaming of the kite shaped pattern of stars, the Southern Cross.
According to her when she was a young girl on Stradbroke Island she knew it as Mirabooka. She said the Europeans not only stole our lands but also our sky.
A painting from Yirrkala shows the Cross as a sting ray being chased by a shark which represents the Pointers. The paintings have to be interpreted by the artists or members of the Aboriginal community since they have meanings and associations attached to them.
The thirty-six paintings that were collected during the expedition were also dispersed along with the others to the museums and galleries despite the fact that taken together these thirty-six paintings have their own story to tell.
It has been a difficult task to locate them because in most cases they are held in the dark vaults of the museums and galleries and have long been forgotten by curators and the guardians of the collections.
Over fifteen of these paintings cannot be found despite a search being made by the writer. They have either been stolen, lost, sold or misplaced.
The paintings that have been found should be brought together and classified as the Aboriginal Astronomical Heritage Collection and returned to the Aboriginal people of Arnhem Land so that they can enjoy their heritage rather than having the paintings retained in dark forgotten vaults of museums and galleries.
Dr Ragbir Bhathal has written six books on astronomy, conducts research at the University of Western Sydney and is carrying out a National Project on Aboriginal Astronomy.
Email a friend
Favourites
Del.icio.us
Facebook
Digg
StumbleUpon
MySpace
Reddit
Newsvine
LinkedIn
Kwoff
Twitter