Cultural Astronomy
Level Two
Installation view of 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art, Potter Museum of Art, the University of Melbourne, 2025. Featuring Kaylene Whiskey (Yankunytjatjara, born 1976), Seven Sistas story 2021. Museum & Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin. Photography by Christian Capurro.
About the room
This gallery looks at different forms of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge. Works of art and cultural objects encode intricate layers of astronomical and environmental knowledge mapped out in the stars and passed down from generation to generation, through song, dance, narrative and visual culture.
Yolŋu and Anangu artists render visible narratives of the Seven Sisters that are written in the Pleiades constellation – giving tangible form to ancestral stories sung in ceremony or told around a campfire. The way they manifest the Seven Sisters story in paint and woven tjanpi (spinifex grass) contrasts with the printmaking of the Zenadth Kes (Torres Strait Islands) masters. Their monochrome linocuts with intricate minaral (patterning) detail customary motifs, totems and graphic symbols once incised onto masks, headdresses, dance machines and utilitarian objects.
Another grouping focuses on cultural objects, bark paintings and sculptures of spirit-beings from the Kimberley, Tiwi Islands, Cape York and East Arnhem Land. The Wanjina images, Mokuy figures, Tiwi sculptures, paintings, tunga (bark baskets) and Queensland Rainforest shields from across northern Australia reveal the artists’ cultural knowledge, sculptural prowess and brilliant use of natural materials from their home environments, which connect them with their Country and ancestors.
Consultant Statement
Leitha Assan
Kulba yadail / kikem kerker miratager (Stories of long ago) are etched in Torres Strait Islander art ... [Our] artists have pioneered a unique form of art to tell our histories and stories, and to mirror the iconography of our ancestors. Regarded as masters of lino carving, our printmakers explore their social and physical environment; they reclaim and reaffirm their culture for future generations by carving into lino the intricately detailed customary motifs, totems and graphic symbols that once adorned ceremonial objects, body scarification and functional items. An important aspect of Islanders’ inherited knowledge is our cosmological understanding and the interconnection of Dapar (sky), Malu(sea) and Bardthar (land). Stories of Thoegay and the Zugubal, the creators of Zenadth Kes customary beliefs and practices, are interpreted on elaborate linocut prints, telling of the cosmological relationship and its interconnectedness with Zenadth Kes traditional seasonal calendars – our sense of identity, culture and tradition.
– Leitha Assan, 2023
