AHOTW Symposium - Professor Steven Tingay & Charmaine Green - Listening to the stars

Listening to the stars: cutting edge astrophysics meets Aboriginal ways of knowing through the antennas of the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA)

Transcript

Steven Tingay: My name is Steven Tingay. I’m an astrophysicist by training and trade and as James prefaced I’ve been involved in building radio telescopes in order to study the universe all the way back to the big bang. So that’s my day job. In order to do this we need to build our radio telescopes in remote locations that are free from human-made radio interference. After an extensive process of looking around the world the best site in the world to do this is in the middle of the Murchison, Wajarri Yamaji country. And so over the last decade we’ve worked to build this radio telescope composed of thousands of these individual antennas, at Boolardy Station in the Murchison, with the permission of the Wajarri Yamaji people. Back in 2009 Charmaine and I met somewhat by chance and kicked off a project of getting astronomers together with Indigenous artists to look at different perspectives of the universe.

Charmaine Green: And that first was called Ilgarijiri, which means ‘things belonging to the sky’, and we embraced — the Yamaji Art Centre in Geraldton had embraced the opportunity to work with the scientists in astrophysics, to come together and listen to the stories from a western perspective but also to tell our stories through the Yamaji eye. Ilgarijiri has taken the collaboration over throughout the world and across Australia, and more recently we’ve collaborated through Shared Sky with South Africa, and that’s also been a great journey. And from Shared Sky with the Bethesda Arts Centre in South Africa, producing the antennas that we have was part of that process.

Steven Tingay: So we might talk a bit about the process. I mean, we’ve been working together for seven years. In the initial stages I think it was fair to say that the two groups, artists and astronomers, weren’t quite sure if we would be able to connect, and we took it very slowly in the beginning. We took a trip together to the site where the telescopes were being built on country, and that really kicked things off. Do you want to talk us through from your point of view how that initial interaction went?

Charmaine Green: Well for me working with the astronomers started in 2003. I’d kind of been on this 13-year journey and looking at going out to Boolardy a couple of times was an opportunity, that we wanted to go out and see what was going to be done to the land, what the impact to the land was going to be. But we also wanted to go out because this had thrown us a really great opportunity to reclaim our stories and to tell our stories. Because of the impact of colonisation had told our parents and our grandparents to bury your culture and you no longer have to tell your stories because you’re living a different way. So we really grabbed that opportunity to tell our stories and to tell our traditional and contemporary stories in Western Australia because they just don’t get heard very often from the Yamaji region. So going out to Boolardy and going out to scientists was really quite strange at first. Travelling out there, 300 kilometres inland, we’d pulled up at Mullewa which is 100 kilometres from Geraldton, collected some more artists on that first trip. There was about 16 of us, mainly female. It was pretty quiet during the day, the scientists seemed to be very quiet people. We didn’t know how to actually talk to them or...

Steven Tingay: Special people.

Charmaine Green: Yeah special people, and we were wondering, well when’s this conversation going to start, when are we going to do something? Then as the sun started going down something started happening to these people. [audience laughter]

Steven Tingay: We didn’t grow claws and fur.

Charmaine Green: They started changing and started becoming more — the darker it got the more animated they got... [audience laughter]

Charmaine Green: ...they started pointing and looking at the sky and... [audience laughter]

Charmaine Green: ...we started getting really comfortable because this is what we like doing, we’ve grown up looking at the stars. We can’t believe that people live in urban areas and the cities, and we know because of light pollution, but they don’t look up. They just look straight ahead or — straight ahead, I guess. So they were getting really animated and the really crazy thing was, the film crew wanted to build a campfire because of this romantic notion of sitting around a campfire and yarning. It was like...

Steven Tingay: It was warm.

Charmaine Green: It was 50 degrees actually... [audience laughter]

Charmaine Green: ...the day we went out there so by the time the fire was lit it would have been about 35, 40 still, so some of the older ladies thought, oh my goodness, you know, sitting around this campfire, but that’s what they wanted and that’s what we – we were going along for the journey. Earlier in the day we’d gone into — and at 50 degrees — we’d gone into a transportable in the middle of the Murchison which had all these antennas around them, had all these — it wasn’t super-computers then I don’t think...

Steven Tingay: No, just normal. Charmaine Green: ...it had all these instruments inside from around the world sitting in this transportable, and they were explaining to us that they were collecting sound waves from space to convert into data to make these 2D images which the scientists can then study. One of the artists said, oh yeah OK. It’s kind of went over our head and we’re saying, oh it’s easier for us to just stick to our traditional stories, we don’t understand the rest of this. So one of them has said, “Steve can I listen to that noise?” So one of the scientists turned it on, it’s just static. And she didn’t believe them. She didn’t think that was noise from space. So...

Steven Tingay: Well I think perhaps over time we’ve convinced some people that this actually works, but some of the artists bought into this very quickly and in fact some of the artworks that emerged were very interesting interpretations of waves travelling through space, and picking up on that interpretation. But yeah what you say about the sun going down and the stars coming out, I think we’d sort of found our point of connection, the night sky, and I guess when it comes to Indigenous, non-Indigenous discussions in Australia there’s obviously a massive amount of controversy over country and land. But the thing about the sky is that nobody can own it. You can’t appropriate the sky, it’s literally impossible, and it’s also part of the shared heritage of all people on earth. And everyone who’s sat under the stars wonders about what it’s all about and has done so over history. So yeah we’d found our point of connection and from that point on things really accelerated. The artists got greatly involved and produced — how many pieces of art did they produce?

Charmaine Green: The first exhibition we produced 180 pieces of artwork which travelled from Geraldton to Perth to Canberra to Washington, and then to Europe, and we’ve since created artwork that’s gone on the catwalk in 2010 in Paris, London, and Melbourne and Perth. So we’ve done a whole lot of collaborations that have come out of the Ilgarijiri journey, which is what I call it, Ilgarijiri, ‘things belonging to the sky’. But one of the most important things at Boolardy, and talking about the sky itself, is, with the impact of colonisation on my people, one of the things that the colonisers did not stop was our connection to the sky, and our way of using the sky, because the sky mirrors the land, our way of using the sky to tell our stories. Doing this collaboration wasn’t without its cultural politics and we had to tread very lightly because the sky is a very sacred and important place as well, to work out how we would tell those stories. We concentrated on bush tucker, we concentrated on the seasons’ foods, on weather patterns, and tracking of animals during the bush tucker seasons. One of the most important things I think which the artists were really thrilled about was that some of the scientists had never seen the emu in the sky, which we talk about and paint about extensively, because to us — a lot of non-Aboriginal people when they look at the sky they look at stars and the shiny things, we look at the dark matter in the sky, and this is very important to us. So we were really pleased when there were a couple of scientists there, that we could show them the emu in the sky at Boolardy.

Steven Tingay: I was one of them.

Charmaine Green: And you were one of them…

Steven Tingay: ...and I remember that and that will stick with me as one of the most vivid memories I ever have. So I’m a tragic of course, I’ve been hooked on astronomy since the age of six, and as you say, you grow up with the Greek and Roman myths of the sky, which are all about connecting the stars and drawing constellations of various different things. And so that was my knowledge of the sky, they were my stories of the sky that I’d learnt. But the emu in the sky is different, as you say, and consists of the dark patches that run along the middle of the Milky Way galaxy. It’s an enormous structure on the sky, it’s almost 90 degrees, and I’d been staring at the sky for 45 years and had never seen this, but when the artists pointed it out to me on the sky and drew it, it was one of those moments where — spine-tingling. And every time I think about it it’s exactly the same. For me to be looking at that literally for 40 years and never seeing it tells me a lot, because it is the most blindingly obvious representation of an emu in the sky. Once you’ve seen it you can never not see it. So the storytelling went both ways, didn’t it, we learnt a lot and I guess you guys learnt a lot as well.

Charmaine Green: We learnt a lot too because we got to have opportunities that not a lot of other people would have, looking through powerful telescopes and then being introduced to constellations and nebulas. Things that we would not have spoken about 13 years ago we can now go and have a look at and we have conversations in the art centre about different images that come out. Being shown different galaxies in the sky and being shown — no one of the things that really stood out at Boolardy on that first trip was that we never, ever thought of the northern hemisphere and the western constellations being upside down in the southern hemisphere, that was kind of crazy to us, cause we hadn’t thought of it before in that way. But just like the scientists and a lot of other people don’t think about the sky in looking at the dark matter and looking at the shiny, so that shows the two different cultures. But there’s a lot of things that we do share and we all do look up at the sky, so the collaboration has been really — it’s lasted 13 years and it’s still moving along, and...

Steven Tingay: So maybe in the last few minutes we can talk about the object that takes the pride of place as 101st, so, displacing other people’s choices.

Charmaine Green: And that was from — yes which we heard about today — that was in...

Steven Tingay: Very, very, very proud that it’s a chosen...

Charmaine Green: 2014 yeah actually the Yamaji artists who were really upset that the rest of them couldn’t come down, but some are painting for exhibitions. But we’re really pleased that the Western Australian Museum had chosen these objects, mainly because the way and the whole process that the objects were chosen, one, they are contemporary objects, two, it’s a collaborative process which belongs to not only the scientists and not only to the Yamaji artists, but it belongs to all of us. Because those antennas also belong to the rest of the world in the data that they are collecting, and three, because the process has been really ethical in the way that they have been acquired, and the way that the museum have spoken to the Yamaji people right down to the process of having me as an Aboriginal person sit up here on the stage this afternoon and talk to you about Yamaji things. So we were really pleased and really proud that this has happened and the Western Australian Museum had chosen the objects in that manner. The object for us, it kind of happened in the last trip to Boolardy in 2013 or 2014, and I’d seen them before and they look like spiders, and they look like all these little spiders on the ground and everywhere, and when we got out there I’d said to Steve, I wanted to make an impression that we’d been there, not just a group that arrived in a space and then leave and you don’t know that they’ve been there. So I said to Steve, “can I wrap some of those in wool, can we touch those and can we do something with them?” So...

Steven Tingay: Mind you, you were pointing at one of the operational antennas that was currently collecting data... [audience laughter]

Steven Tingay: ...and I had to think for five seconds and do a quick, sort of, mental calculation of how wool would change the electromagnetic properties of our antennas, and then I thought, oh bugger it, it’s probably OK. And so then Charmaine and some colleagues got in amongst the antennas and started yarn-bombing them — is that the word?

Charmaine Green: Yeah yarn-bombing them, and it was about 38 degrees then too so it was still quite hot, but then before we left, after we did that, and we’d put our energy on them, and were touching these man-made objects that kind of didn’t belong to our culture. I’d said to Steve, “can I have some of those?” [audience laughter]

Steven Tingay: I was just so used to saying yes by then that I just said yes. [audience laughter]

Charmaine Green: And I was really surprised and I said, “can I have some of those?”, and then the artist had said, “what are you doing?” ‘Cause we were under pressure to produce all these paintings, and we did really large paintings about the western constellations, did in an Aboriginal style, in artwork. Then I brought the antennas out and I said, “we’re going to make an installation and it’s going to be called Ngarlayimanha, and that means ‘searching for something’, cause these fellas are out there searching for something and we want to be able to — if it’s a collaboration — we want to be able to use some material from the scientists’ world and from the other world, and then put our energy on it and touch it as well.” And we want to be able to show how the sound waves are coming down because not a lot of people can conceptualise that, so the concepts that you’ll see with the antennas that are not assembled, we did put four back together ourselves and painted those in the dot style painting, and we also embellished those with Australian wool, and we had them cascading down because it represents the sound waves that they are collecting and the important data. So it was the first time that we did a collaborative installation. There’s ten artists, Yamaji and Badimaya artists, who produced the antennas, and we were really pleased to get them shown in Perth and in the Western Australian Museum last year, and now in the process had gone to being included in this exhibition.

Steven Tingay: Yeah for me, so it’s obviously an object but for me it’s so deeply multi-layered. I think of the radio waves that came from the gas that existed shortly after the big bang and those radio waves have travelled 13 billion years to hit the antennas, and then be converted into data that we then interpret to understand essentially where we came from, where the universe came from. And they have existed in this environment, in the Murchison, which is an unbelievably beautiful environment so, sort of, co-existence of the ancient and the modern and the technology and the history and culture, and then for them to be transformed after doing that job into something with even more layers of energy and culture. So they’re not just objects, they take for me some very — words can’t really describe it for me but going back to one of the talks this morning, this blurring of the lines of the sacred and the secular, some scientists think of science as a sacred activity and you get that feeling, or I get that feeling at least, out of collaborations like this, so it’s been a great honour for me to be working with you guys and hopefully there’s another seven years in it.

Charmaine Green: And this particular photo here was part of the process of when the antennas were coming down to the John Curtin University last year to be first displayed we’d taken them down to the beach in Geraldton, and we did a ceremony and we blessed the installation, and this was what was happening there before we packed them into the vehicle and then drove them down. So it was a whole process around this, well, contemporary and modern object that has been included today, and today onwards.

Steven Tingay: Yeah, I’m not sure where it’s going to go next but Charmaine does push the envelope a bit... [audience laughter] S

teven Tingay: ...and the last trip out to site in 2014 Charmaine had me writing poetry which was confrontational for a physicist but Charmaine is insistent and I did produce poetry, and actually it wasn’t too bad, I actually enjoyed it, and so getting out of one’s comfort zone and doing some of these things is part of the whole creative process.

Charmaine Green: Yeah so that was good fun for us too, watching the scientists...

Steven Tingay: Squirm!

Charmaine Green: ...watching the scientists trying to write poetry was — and then I made them perform it, by the way, with a guitarist, so that was the — but the whole idea of the antennas, and like I said earlier, we’re very proud that these objects have been included, and it does tell a story, it tells a story where we can reclaim the right to tell our story and tell our collaborative story in this instant, which is the first time we’ve done it in this way. All the other paintings, the other ways that we’ve told our collaborative story, is taking interest in what the scientists are telling us, and painting paintings about nebulas, constellations and different galaxies, that the Yamaji artists haven’t seen before. But thank you very much for this afternoon.

Steven Tingay: Yeah. Thank you. [audience applause]