Arabic version: أصداء كونية تربط معارف الشعوب الأصلية بالسماء

According to The Guardian, Cosmic Echoes: A shared sky explores Indigenous relationships with the night sky through work by artists from Australia and South Africa. The exhibition has toured Africa and Europe and has returned to Australia, connecting stories of astronomy, identity and Country across the southern hemisphere.

For Yamaji-Wajarri artist Carlleen Dingo, memories of the skies above Geraldton, or Jambinu, include watching stars while sitting around a fire in the bush. She learned from her grandmothers that ancestors travelled and hunted by reading the sky. Dingo’s paintings travelled from Geraldton to Africa, then to Manchester and Luxembourg.

The exhibition is linked to Wajarri country, where the Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, or Murchison radio-astronomy observatory, hosts the Square Kilometre Array Observatory’s SKA-Low telescope. The array has 131,072 two-metre-tall antennas spread across 74 kilometres and maps distant galaxies, cosmic magnetic fields and black holes. CSIRO’s Space and Astronomy unit director, Dr Douglas Bock, said the agency’s relationship with the Wajarri Yamaji Aboriginal Corporation has developed over about 20 years.

In South Africa, the SKA Observatory is building the SKA-Mid telescope in the Karoo, comprising 196 dish antennas, each almost 15 metres tall. Artist Junior Oliphant’s exhibition work depicts Dr Katrina Esau, known as Ouma Katrina, a traditional language speaker and advocate. Oliphant said Khoisan stories describe the Milky Way as ashes that flew into the sky after a caged girl cried until the cage exploded.

SKAO director-general Prof Jessica Dempsey described the exhibition as an artistic exploration of science, technology and astronomy across two continents. She said First Peoples held astronomical knowledge long before western technology confirmed some observations, citing the Seven Sisters, or Pleiades, which are portrayed as a family in stories from many cultures.