Conversation with Duane Hamacher Author of The First Astronomers

In the inaugural episode of the Book Science podcast, host Tripp Collins interviews Duane Hamacher, an Associate Professor of Cultural Astronomy in the ASTRO-3D Centre of Excellence and the School of Physics at the University of Melbourne, about his book, The First Astronomers: How Indigenous Elders Read the Stars, co-authored with Indigenous elders. Over 15 years, Duane’s journey revealed the significant scientific insights embedded in Aboriginal astronomy, challenging initial dismissiveness towards these knowledge systems. He emphasizes the collaborative nature of the book, which intertwines technical astronomy with accessibility, themes of cultural science, and the integral relationship between Indigenous knowledge and the environment. The discussion explores Indigenous scientific observations—like the predictive prowess of Torres Strait Islanders, their sophisticated narratives around astronomical phenomena, and the cultural significance of these traditions. Duane also highlights upcoming projects that aim to further bridge Indigenous knowledge with contemporary scientific understanding, advocating for a mutual respect and humility in learning from these rich cultural insights. 

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Tripp: This show was recorded in Narrm, Melbourne, Australia, where the traditional custodians include the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, and we pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging. I'm Tripp Collins, and this is Book Science. The podcast explores how the best science books are written and why they matter. 

Tripp: Today I'm bringing you a discussion with Duane Hamachjer. Duane is an associate professor of cultural astronomy in the Aster 3D Center of Excellence and the School of Physics at the University of Melbourne in Melbourne, Australia. Duane is a cultural astronomer. He works directly with indigenous communities, building connection and understanding of the complementary nature of Western astronomy and indigenous sky knowledge. Duane has worked with Miriam Elders for over a decade to document the astronomical knowledge and traditions of the eastern Torres Strait Islanders and with other First Nations communities across Australia and across the world. We talk about Duane's book called The First Astronomers, How Indigenous Elders Read the Stars. The First Astronomers is thus far the culmination of his work and was co-written with many elders and elder knowledge holders, including Ghillar Michael Anderson, John Barsa, David Bosun, Ron Day, Segar Passi, and Alo Tapim. 

We discuss a number of topics, including indigenous knowledge systems, meteorites, variable stars, and working with Aboriginal knowledge holders. I love this book and I've read it several times, each time getting more out of it. I really hope you enjoy this conversation with Duane Hamacher. 

Tripp: So I have to tell you a little story before we get into the contents of the book. I was scrolling through the Libby app, it's like the public library app, the Melbourne Public Library, and I was in like the nonfiction science section and then boom, this orange cover pops in and it just caught my eye. The cover art is just amazing. It works on purely a surface level, but over the course of reading the book, of course, you discover it's a painting and the painting contains these deep cultural knowledge and representations of cultural knowledge. 

And I think at some point later, hopefully we'll touch on that. So the art was the first thing and then there was the title. So it was The First Astronomers, as in the astronomy of the First Nations peoples, but also like literally first as in the first people to develop knowledge systems that incorporated astronomical observations. And I think in some cases it first also refers to what we call priority in science. 

So the fact that there are astronomical phenomena first observed and described by indigenous people long before art traditions in western science. So this was a title with many layered meanings. And yeah, and after reading it, I discovered not only are we currently on the same continent, but our offices were literally within walking distance to each other. And then of course, I audited your class where we go through the ideas in the book in detail, which was really an incredible experience. And yeah, so that's my story of finding the book. But I'd like to start by kind of getting in your words. What is this book all about? 

Duane Hamacher: Well, this book is about 10 years in the making, actually almost 15 years in the making now. It all started off when I came to Australia 21 years ago as a study abroad student. I went to Macquarie University in Sydney and had an amazing experience. But at the time, I'd asked somebody about Aboriginal astronomy. 

I was doing my undergraduate degree in astrophysics and the response I got was very dismissive. And it was very much a silly American. What are you talking about? Aboriginal people don't have any astronomy. 

Don't you know any better? Remember being quite taken aback by that and being like, what are we talking about? And at the time, I didn't think too much of it. 

I thought it was a weird response that I got the few times I asked about it, but, you know, whatever. And then I came back a couple of years later to do grad school, the study astrophysics, and I got sort of drawn back to that question. Like, why is it that when we talk about astronomy and we talk about Aboriginal culture, people think there are two different worlds that don't belong together at all? And I started looking into it and it didn't take much effort, really, to just see how much science was embedded within the knowledge of astronomy by Aboriginal people. And whenever I would ask about that, I'd still keep getting these dismissive responses. And I thought, well, maybe this is something that interests me more, actually, than astrophysics does. So I decided to pursue that. 

And then a PhD in that area, unpacking the science behind the star knowledges. Because that's something that Indigenous cultures of the world, especially here in Australia, are not given any credit for. The idea they would have science just makes people scoff. 

And I find that absurd. So, you know, I began working in my first academic position was at the University of New South Wales, working with Professor Martin Nakata. So Martin Nakata is a Torres Strait Islander. And at the time, he was the director of the Indigenous Center there. 

And he offered me my very first job. And we sat down together and we did a strategic plan the next 10 years, you know, to build up the field of Indigenous astronomy. What are we going to do? How are we going to do it? What's the timeline going to be? 

Get some major grants, start publishing, start getting the word out. And the book was one of those items in that list. Like, here's a culmination of what we're going to do. So that book was a long time in the making. It was certainly a long time in the writing, because I was doing it mostly over COVID. And it was one of those projects that I loved, but absolutely almost did my head in. 

Well, I'll try and do it, especially during COVID. But at the end, when I got that first paper copy in my hands, at home, when I opened the letter, which had been sent to my neighbor across the hall, they found me on Facebook and said, are you Duane Hamacher? Do you live in this building? 

I'm like, yeah, I'm in this apartment and I literally opened my door and he's right there across the hall. Opened it up and there was the first copy of the book. And it was very rewarding, but it was really that that emphasis on what is the science behind the star knowledge. And as a scientist, as an astronomer, it gave me a perfect opportunity to really deep dive into that. 

Tripp: Yeah, you talked a little bit about your mentor, who is a Torres [Straight] islander. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of getting buy-in from Indigenous elders, many of whom you credited as co-authors on this project? And I imagine this was sort of key from the beginning. 

Duane Hamacher: It always was. I mean, when you're going to be looking at the knowledge of a community or a group, you work with the elders or the knowledge holders. Now, it's easy to go through and do as I did with my PhD. You do all the work on published literature, which is predominantly Western, early colonists in Australia, other ethnologists and anthropologists and linguists. And sometimes, Farmer Bob, who would be publishing or writing information about Aboriginal people and their relationship to the stars. In many cases, even in newspapers, you'd be surprised how much knowledge and information I got from newspapers. 

But you always have to acknowledge the severe limitations in that and challenges with accuracy and things like that. But part of the way through my PhD, I met a local elder in Sydney named Les Bursill. He was a Dharawal elder. And he took me under his wing. And he was super supportive. He was somebody that gave me a lot of great advice, gave me great direction. I sat with him many times for many hours, and we would go out on country. He lived down South part of Sydney. We would go to Royal National Park. 

And he'd be showing me rock art sites and telling me what things meant. And as you do as a non-Indigenous person, as a non-Australian in this space, you're working your way for it. And sometimes you're going to go down the wrong pathway or say or do something stupid. You know, they're there to correct you and put you back in line. And it was a really wonderful experience having that kind of guidance and mentorship. And then when I began working in my academic position at UNSW, Martin Nakata was and remains a very powerful mentor for me and an ally. 

You know, somebody who has always been very supportive. You know, being a non-Indigenous person working in this space doesn't always go very nicely. People can misinterpret what you're doing or assume you're not doing it for the right reasons. And it's good to have those kinds of people in your corner to help guide you and make sure that things are being done right. 

Of course, it's always been my goal here. And then working with other elders, you know, in the Torres Straights, became quite close with a few of the elders in particular. Uncle Alo Tapim, the person I was the most close to. And he trained linguistics at the Bachelors Institute. And he grew up with Meriam Mir as the local Indigenous language in Eastern Torres Straight. They only Papuan language of Australia, actually. 

He grew up with that as the first language. And, you know, he was a great guiding force for all of that. And he helped me connect with a lot of the other elders and, you know, became this situation where when it came time to publish the book, I knew I wanted to include the elders as authors. I've done that on academic papers and that's been fine. But, you know, how do you do it on a book? 

Well, I told my publisher I wanted to include them as co-authors. She said, oh, great, you know, how many do you have? I said about 85. 

She said, sorry, can't do that. There has to be six. I'm like, six? Why only six? 

She's about the trade book industry. You can only have a maximum of seven authors, so you and six others. So I chose the six elders that had worked the closest with me over time than the most worked with. 

There were many who I acknowledged in the book, of course, but I couldn't put as little co-authors. And they do tend to be, they are all male. This tends to be the protocol when you go working in communities. In general, they're not going to send me out to talk all the aunties. I did talk with elders and they're discussed in the book and things. 

But when it came time for me to pick who those seven were, those are the seven that I picked. And, you know, it was a really great opportunity to be able to work with the communities there and showcase their knowledge on a global stage. And there's stuff all around the world in that book. It's not just the tourist trade or even just Australia. But five of those elders are from the tourist trade because that was the main focus of much of that work that I was doing. But the great thing about it is the parallels between what they do in the tourist trade and what other communities do around the world are so remarkably close. 

It didn't matter what they're talking about. They're the same communities in the Arctic or in the rainforests or in the desert or wherever very, very similar types of knowledge in the way that was used. So it was a great way to showcase not only their knowledge, but to see how it connects with other cultures around the world. 

Tripp: Yeah, I remember this was something you talked about in class is that Indigenous knowledge systems are sort of like a local application. So while the specifics might be different from one place to another, the way that they integrate a holistic knowledge system is very similar, which sort of resulted in similar stories, similar observations, different places by Indigenous people around the world. 

Duane Hamacher: Then it comes down to the science as well. The reason those knowledges do that is because they're based on the laws of physics and the observation of the natural world. The laws of physics apply everywhere. And you see this particular kind of phenomenon that has an application. There might be slight variations that might be geographic or relating to the local climate or weather. But at the foundational level, it's the same science and that's the beauty of it.

Tripp: Did you find that they were motivated to get some of their knowledge into a book like this that would appeal to Western readers? 

Duane Hamacher: Yes. So there was a few different reasons the communities were really adamant about this work being done. This wasn't just me going and saying, I want to do this. It was them saying, look, this is what we want and what we need. So there is a couple of different levels. One of them is for cultural continuity in these communities. So they want to make sure that the knowledge is safeguarded and preserved for future generations. Now, the reason a book would be important, it's not just the book. 

It's the knowledge being shared and how that can be applied to local education and in curriculum. The communities in the Torres Straight, as with many parts of Australia, you know, on these remote islands, on Mer, which is where I spent most of my time, is on the order of 450 people on the island. There's a school that only goes to year six and it only has about 50 students, 50, 55 students in it. So when the students reach the age of around 12, and it's time for them to go on to year seven, they have to leave the island. They either go to one of two other islands where there's schools that go to year 12 or they go to the mainland. They stay with family or friends. And then when they come home, they're only on home during holidays or, you know, maybe during the summer. And then when they reach the age where it's time to grow up and leave home, there aren't many economic opportunities on the islands. 

So majority people go and live in the mainland. You know, they're in Darwin, Cairns, Townsville, Brisbane, wherever. So what happens there is you have a bit of a just a, of a rupture and the knowledge transmission. So a lot of the younger kids that are on the island, they know a lot of stuff, right? But once they get to that age of around 12, then they're not around for most of the year. And as they go into adulthood, quite often, they're not home that they're not home very often. 

Then like everybody else around their phones or playing video games or doing stuff that all kids want to do, right? So that knowledge, like I said, is that rupture? So elders are concerned that language, knowledge and traditions aren't being passed down. So how do we, how do we help this? Well, going in and working with them to develop curriculum modules that will be taught in the schools, working on developing videos and planetarium shows and books and all this kind of stuff helps with that. There's also the element of educating the world about their knowledge. And when I sat with some of the elders and, you know, we were talking about what I was doing and why I was doing it, because I go work with these communities by invitation, but sometimes they're kind of vaguely aware of what I do. And I said, well, I'm here to show that your knowledge has a lot of science behind it. You know, like, we've been saying that for decades, but nobody will listen. 

That's why I'm here. I know it's a, it's an unfortunate situation that that's how it is, but let's grab the bull by the horns, as we say, and get some creative outputs out of this and really showcase this on a global stage. And we've done that not only with the book, but even with documentaries. I mean, there was a Torres Strait Islander star dance, a shooting star dance that hadn't been performed on the island in a very long time that was featured in the Werner Herzog documentary, you know, on the second Aboriginal community that had their their traditional knowledge shared in the Morgan Freeman documentary on National Geographic. So we're getting the stuff out there in a big way. 

Tripp: Yeah, that's amazing. You've done a lot of media, TV, podcasts, maybe talk about the form of the book, like what makes a book like uniquely challenging and maybe uniquely rewarding. You said you were maybe a bit frustrated at some points during the process of putting it together. Maybe talk about that a little bit. 

Duane Hamacher: Writing in an academic fashion is very easy for me anyway, because you're just you're getting faxed out on paper. But with this kind of a book, is it called a trade book, what I mean by that is a popular book. It's not an academic book, you know, but that's a very different beast in and of itself, you no longer just starting fax out, you know, you have to have a narrative, you have to have a story, things have to link together. 

It has to keep people engaged. You've got to want to pick the book up and read it. And reading something in dry academies is not going to be what you people are going to be willing, you know, we publish academic research papers and journals for that reason. They go on to all the great detail and show how and why everything works together and talk about the methodologies and the theoretical frameworks and all that stuff. But the average punter who wants to learn about this stuff doesn't care about that. And if they do, there's the academic papers, have fun. 

They're really available and they, you know, the papers I've put on, you know, ResearchGate and academia.edu have been accessed a quarter of a million times, which has been great. But when you're writing a book like this, you've got to find something that's going to engage people. And that, that can be a double-edged sword. 

It's great to get people to see it and learn about it. You can't get too technical with it. And of course, a lot of people in the world who really want to focus on super technical details and they're a bit disappointed when you can't cover everything. But I had to think, how can I create a narrative in this book? How can I get some themes that are, that are going to continue throughout the whole book? And when you start off a narrative, what's it going to be? You know, for me, it was sort of my personal journey coming into this space. But it's also how can this story wrap up at the end? 

How can you bring it all together? And I found it to be a lot of fun to write, but also incredibly challenging. I think the real difficult part was trying to do with over COVID. I think everybody had the same problem with that. 

You know, my ADHD didn't help out with that at all. But we managed to bring it all together. And I decided, you know, to have three major themes in the book. The “as is above, so is below.” There's the, we are people of culture, but we're also people of science, which is something Professor Nakata said and all the other elders reiterated. And the other theme is how you read your environment is going to dictate whether or not you're going to survive or not. So the title of the book, even though the words are spelled exactly the same, it's actually how elders read the stars, which is, which is challenging. You just read and read, you know, spelled the same way and they both make perfect sense. 

And one of the things I wanted to focus on with that is red implies something you get in the past, but don't read as something you continue to do. But yeah, that's English for you, right? That's the limitations we have in our language. 

Tripp: No, but the distinction is important, I think, because these aren't ancient knowledge systems. These are living knowledge systems. These are people practicing these techniques today. So sort of distinction speaks to that aspect of indigenous knowledge. 

Duane Hamacher: Yeah, exactly right. And they're ancient too, but they're still living. And that's the key thing. So it's great in that respect, but also you get across a point that these knowledge systems evolve over time because they're describing the natural environment, the natural environment changes. We go through ice ages, we go through long term climate change. 

You know, the earth spins on its axis and goes through cycles of procession and mutation and all these factors that are going to impact not only what things look like, but when they're going to be visible, when the stars are going to rise or set, what your local environment and climate is going to be like. All of those things are linked together. So the idea that indigenous knowledges are somehow fixed and static in time is inaccurate. They're dynamic, as they have to be, but in the context in which they have to be, you know, they're not going to change for the sake of changing. 

They're going to change because they need to. And they often incorporate new knowledge, new information. And we live in a time now where there's lots of new knowledge and information coming from all around the world. And these communities are phenomenal integrating knowledge and information from other cultures and other ways of knowing that are useful. 

Tripp: Yeah, that was one of the more fascinating things to learn was when you're a scientist like you and I, in our tradition, you know, the basic laws of physics are fixed. And science changes because we get better and better theories or more accurate descriptions or better observations. 

But the bottom line of it is generally fixed. So it was sort of to learn how indigenous knowledge system works, which is the local application is the most important thing. And to think about the changes on Earth over deep time, of course, their knowledge systems have to change. 

And not only that, I mean, like you're talking about astronomy, the stars in the sky that are visible changes over time that these cultures existed. So yeah, that was sort of a revelation to me. Just to return to the writing a little bit, I felt like the book was working on so many levels and you touch on this. I mean, you're explaining indigenous knowledge systems, you're talking about astronomy, you want to write for a broad audience, and you're really diving into complex topics. How was it that you were able to strike a balance on all that? Because I felt like the book was really well balanced, given all the constraints you had, not to mention that you had to be careful there's boundaries about what you can share and what you can't share. 

Duane Hamacher: Yeah, exactly right. So yeah, it became a challenge and the feedback you give, whether it's directly from people, you just go on and see what the reviews are, of course. And it's the same challenge with the book with the same one I get when I'm teaching the class, like you were in, get students from a science background who have some familiarity with this, then you get students from an arts background or some other non-science area that have no idea. And it can be really difficult, like, how much science do I include in here and how deep do I go into that? So at the end of the book, I did include a glossary of scientific terms that I used. 

I tried to not get too technical with it, but you've got to be technical enough with it. So reviews I've seen online, some of them are like, oh, we loved it. And some are like, we hated it. There was too much science. 

Some people didn't like the idea that I was jumping around the different cultures. But what I was trying to show there is when we look at a particular kind of phenomenon, I divvied all the chapters up by I kind of liked the idea of doing these quirky little themes. All the chapters have star in the name, except for the couldn't figure out another way of doing that. 

Star knowledge, the nearest star, the wandering stars, twinkling stars, cataclysmic stars, all that kind of stuff, falling stars. That gave a nice thread throughout. But how am I going to go into that detail and speak about all these things without getting too technical, but without ignoring them? So when you're looking at those kinds of phenomena, I talk about how similar they are by different cultures around the world. So looking at the way that Aboriginal people or Torres Strait Islander people would observe the way the stars twinkle and all the little properties that would change gave you something to read. 

It was like a text. You could read the stars if you knew how to interpret that, and then figure out there's going to be seasonal change or rain, which you also tied into reading your local environment. So what are the clouds doing? What's the direction of the wind? What are the animals doing? Are the insects doing something weird? What does the moon look like? 

Is there a ring around it? All those can tell you things. And what I wanted to do is showcase that if you go to the Arctic, a totally different environment from anything you see inland tundra of northern Alaska compared to the tropical islands of the Torres Strait, remarkably similar applications of that same knowledge. 

So I like to be able to go different places around the world and show how remarkably similar it was. And a lot of people like that, some don't, but that's just how it goes. You can't please everybody. But that was the idea that I had, is I wanted to showcase this knowledge, go into some depth about the science behind it without getting too complicated. But I want people to really understand that this stuff is not easy. Like this science, and just naming some things, or we're doing some very simple observations, there's some real deep scientific observation and deduction and all of that goes into this. And I really want to give people a taste of that. Absolutely. 

Tripp: You touched on the chapter titles. It's a personal narrative. It's your journey. But then you have this structure around the stars. How did that structure come about? Is that something you thought a lot about as you were planning out the book or did that come later? 

Duane Hamacher: It came a bit later. The funny thing is the book was not written in a linear front-to-back fashion at all. In fact, the introductory chapter was the last one that I wrote. The chapter on variable stars was the first one I wrote about six years prior to that, part of it being published. 

I'd written a paper on that and that's when I had the idea of doing a book. Because like I said, you've got all the journal papers and you need a somewhat technical audience to be able to read and understand them, even though I try to write most of my academic papers in such a way where anybody should be able to pick it up and understand what I'm saying. A lot of academic areas don't do that. 

Sciences is just jam packed full of equations and acronyms and in the arts they get very flamboyant with their language, where you need a PhD in English to understand what the hell they're talking about. Yeah, that's right. So I was trying to find that middle ground where you can get complex ideas up, but anybody should be able to pick it up and read it, including people from the communities. You know, communities are smart, but not everybody is an academic and they should be able to pick up the papers and read them and understand what's going on and they shouldn't be hit with a paywall. So I wasn't focusing on publishing all of my research and journals where you had to pay 50 bucks an article to read it. 

How unethical would it be to work with a community who shares their knowledge with you and they have to pay to access their own notes. But with the book, I wanted to try to find a way that I could thread these narratives and I liked themes. So every chapter named after a different type of stellar phenomenon was a lot of fun. So the first one I wrote was on the variable stars, then I wrote the one on the twinkling stars, which is another paper that I've written about a year and a half after the variable star paper. 

And I started thinking about what else can I do with these? You're starting to follow the theme and it's not just I could do on a national phenomenon, which is basically what I did, planets, moon, sun, stars, meteors, whatever. Or I could have done themes like weather prediction, navigation, star maps. 

I could have done a multitude of different avenues of rock and roll. But since it was about the science of the star knowledge, I'll focus on the astronomy side. But to introduce areas that everybody would just be expecting. I didn't do a chapter on constellations because constellations are great. 

There's nothing wrong with that. And I talk about them, but I wanted to get into the science behind them. So I did the cataclysmic stars, the variable stars, twinkling stars, the wandering stars about the planets and all the different cycles the planets go through, which are really difficult to work out. That was a great way for me to think about how I can get these topics across. So yeah, that's something I tried to do. I tried to put some funny anecdotes in there of things that have everything in the book happened, by the way, nothing in there is stuff I made up. And there were so many times I'd be having conversations with people like I am with you. And I remember all this funny incident happened when I was doing X, Y, or Z. I thought, well, do that in the book. 

Put these things in there. The chapter on navigational stars, I talk about how I got lost in the central desert and thought I was going to die with this old Czech geologist. 

Tripp: Yeah, actually, that was a terrifying story. I didn't realize there was going to be life and death stakes involved in the book. Incredible surprise. You want to kind of tell that story a little bit? 

Duane Hamacher: Good friend and colleague of mine, Craig O'Neill, who's a geologist and planetary scientist. He invited me to come work with him, which I'm funny enough not to digress too much, but I first met him in Judo. We both trained in Judo. So we're slamming each other well. He was slamming me around. 

Let's just be clear about that. And I was trying to choke him out. He was excessively choking me out and then found out after a few months of training and beating the hell out of each other that he was an academic. And then we had a crossover in our interests. 

So we became friends and colleagues. And there was a meeting of the Meteoritic Society. So this was a professional global society that said it's meteorites and all the related phenomena. They had a meeting up in Cairns and they were doing a post-conference excursion to the Central Desert. 

There's all kinds of meteorite craters out in the Central Desert. So he says, look, do you want to come along? Help me out with everything. 

And then you can talk about some of the knowledge you've learned from communities about these. I'm like, yeah, that's great. You know, fully paid trip to go out there. 

Of course I'm going to do it. So we were doing that and we're going all over the bush to these meteorite craters. And there's one crater called Kelly West. It's south of Tennant Creek, about half of it between Tennant Creek and Alice Springs. And it's like 20 k's west of the highway. So we went down this dirt road that ran north south and we had to walk by foot seven kilometers into the desert. 

Wow. The giant asteroid crater, which you can barely see. You know, it's exposed as they say in geological terms. 

You can just see the rim of it, but it wasn't like the one you see in Arizona. You know. So we get there with these giant four wheel drive things, just like 30 of us there and everybody's getting ready. So Craig just takes people and starts leaving this convoy of people off into the desert, right? 

So I was going to bring out the back end of that. And there was this one geologist there in the 70s who for whatever reason decided that it was going to be okay to walk around and spin effect country and sort of shorts and flip flops. It's like this long, bushy kind of grass you see on the desert. And the tips of that are like, um, razors. Like needles. Yeah. Like needles. 

Like you're walking around the desert and just slicing you up. So they're going, I'm holding him and a couple of others at the very end. I'm like, all right, we need to go get them. They're starting to disappear into the bush. So grab some water. 

We just take off. And I'm already like, you know, just, I couldn't see them, but I could tell where they were kind of. So I'm just trying to follow them, right? 

Whatever the, I'll just keep following until we catch up to them. And then like, you know, 20 minutes into this walk, I wrote, I didn't have a compass with me. Didn't have a phone. 

Didn't have anything. Like that's okay. We're going to catch up with these guys. And then an hour goes by, we don't catch up with them. Two hours goes by and we're walking around. We're lost. 

And it's just being this guy. He was partially deaf and couldn't speak. So he had a little notebook and he could just understand English and write a little bit of it. 

It's in the Czech Republic, right? So I'm sitting here with this old guy who's oozing fluid from his legs and a rainbow of colors. We're lost out in the middle of the desert. The water is disappearing. It's the middle of the day. I don't think, oh my God, what's going on? We're lost. Yeah. 

Not of chatting. I'm trying not to panic. I don't want to freak him out or anything. I'm like, we'll be okay. And then we finally, I'm like, hang on. I'm an astronomer. 

We can figure this out. And he had a watch. Like what time is it? It's noon. 

I was like, perfect. So if it's noon, that means the sun's the meridian. The sun's the meridian, that means my shadow is facing exactly due south. 

Right? So the road we were walking, that we were driving down, random north south. We've been going west. So therefore, if I walk towards the east with the sun 90 degrees to my right, we're going to come across that road. And we walk and we walk and we walk and I'm freaking out. We were out of water. 

You know, we're starting to get really weary. I climbed this tree trying to see if I can recognize a road. I can't see anything. I recognize a little forested area. 

We don't know what's going on. Keep walking in about 20 meters away. There was the road. 

It was just an angle where I couldn't see it from the tree. I jumped out in the road and I'm jumping up and down. I'm yelling at him, the road. 

We're hugging each other all sweaty and disgusting. And then I see other groups of people walking up from even further south than we are. They got lost as well. But now that we're walking and you get lost, even though I was trying desperately to stay in this straight line, because I'm right foot dominated, I ended up walking in a giant loop. So yeah, but I remember Les Bursal, that elder is one who had mentioned to me when we were out at Royal National Park, I know where the sun is because that's how you can navigate. 

And if the sun's high in the sky, that means it's around noon, your shadow's going to be pointing south. Which I kind of remembered from, I kind of knew from my army training, but he's the one who reiterated that in a big way. So that was quite a terrifying experience. 

Tripp: No doubt. Luckily, you weren't dehydrated and kept your wits about you, put some navigation knowledge to practice there. They talk about an unforgiving environment. I mean, the stories of people going into the deep desert in all Australia, never to be seen again. There are many of those. 

Duane Hamacher: What happens even outside Sydney? I mean, just in the blue mountains, west of Sydney, people go walking down in the bushland there and they found people's bodies 20 meters away from the road. 

Tripp: Yeah. And just never knew the road was there. You include a lot of these stories, which are great. And they all tie it right back into the themes of the book. You would mention at some point you're talking with an Indigenous knowledge holder and they're explaining something to you, but they were doing it in this way that sort of revealed that they were giving you the preschool lesson. And you were, you kind of called on and you were like, oh, there are levels to this. 

You just don't get those levels the first time you meet someone. There's a system of transfer of knowledge, which is almost like an apprenticeship. You got to put your dues in, you got to put your time in. And if it's not your path, maybe you never get to those deeper levels. 

Duane Hamacher: That's right. So knowledge is power. Knowledge is very much power in these communities. It's very, very much the case. And knowledge is intellectual property. So the elders don't necessarily say it in that way, but for people these days to really get a grasp of it, it's their IP. You don't just give your IP away. Right. 

You might lose to that. You start working with somebody. You build up relationships and you start sharing more information with them with the plan for mutual benefit as they're doing with me. You have to sharing knowledge with me. 

And I'm turning that, yes, I'm turning into academic papers, which they approve and our authors on, but also what are the community outputs? You know, the education curricula and the films and books and things. But when you're working with these communities, you're always aware of this much deeper levels of knowledge. So the way the communities work is, you know, youth, when they reach a certain age, start being taught the deeper layers of that meaning. And they go through years of very intense instruction where they have they go through an initiation at the end, which is basically graduation, which, you know, will involve them performing the dance, sing the songs and reciting the narratives. 

And the stories verbatim as they were taught, which in some cases can take hours and hours and hours to recite the story to make sure you get everything right. Because if that knowledge is inaccurate, it's not just inconvenient. It's deadly. You have to know what's going on. So you have to prove yourself intellectually and you have to prove yourself physically. 

There's almost always some kind of physical components of this. You know, you have to be a whole person. You can't just be a brainiac and you can't just, you know, you purely focus on the physical. You have to integrate those physical, mental and spiritual worlds. And then there's multiple layers of knowledge as you go, you know, further in life and get older and older to where, you know, the knowledge that's being shared is so important and so sacred that you have to make sure the people who are passing that and maintaining that, you know, holding that knowledge have earned their place. 

You have to make sure why people have it. So there's all these protocols and restrictions on that and that could include restricting it by levels of initiation or education or gender or think of that nature. So there's a lot of men's business and women's business and that kind of thing. So when I go when I'm working, that's why they tend to put me with the men first because it would be inappropriate to share women's business with me. 

But even men's business, we have to make sure everybody's, you know, happy with that being shared publicly. So what happens with that process is most of everything in the book and what we talk about are the lower levels of knowledge. Right. That's just that's the public levels of knowledge, the deeper levels of knowledge tend to have those restrictions. And sometimes communities are happy to share that, but usually they only want to give small bits of that out. So that's what I was kind of getting around with this book that even though there's a tremendous degree of knowledge that I talk about in the book, and a lot more than I don't talk about that I would like to, but I didn't have enough room because you know their page limits. 

There's the upper levels of all that knowledge that I haven't didn't even touch on, right, which are much deeper. But that one time I was working with Uncle Ron Day and sort of wrapping everything up and as I turned everything off, you know, what it was clear I wasn't taking notes or anything. It's like, oh yeah. And he just sort of, it reminds me of this and he just sort of did this launch and some stuff really technical. So imagine you're like a high school student, you get a physics professor talking about, you know, advanced quantum theory or something. And I'll send this, you know, like, oh my God, this is really detailed, you know, incredible knowledge, knowing full well that I wasn't going to be able to write it down, but also knowing that it wasn't meant for me to write down. That he was sharing something with me, you know, but it was also, you know, there were multiple layers to why he was doing that. 

One of them was also to let me know, to remind me that no matter how enthusiastic you get and how excited you get, we're only sharing with you a tiny fraction of what we actually know. This, I think, not only becomes an interesting challenge when you're doing this kind of research and trying to communicate it, but I also think it's one of the reasons the general public doesn't have a better respect or appreciation for these knowledges, because literally what they're told of the preschool in kindergarten or version. So they see all that and they think, oh, well, this is kind of a kindergarten level, they think that's what it is. Like, no, no, no, we're literally teaching you the kindergarten, we've got the more advanced stuff, but that's not necessarily for us to show you. So people see the basics and they think that's all it is. 

Tripp: I got to a section in the book and I was, you know, surprised and delighted to see some oceanography and meteorology and climate. The more you learn, the more it shouldn't be all that surprising, because all these things are connected and they're connected intimately for Indigenous people. It's about these careful observations over deep time, they get integrated into this like holistic worldview. There aren't silos of study like there are for you and I. 

Duane Hamacher: Well, that's exactly it. Everything has to have meaning and application and it's about thriving and surviving. There's all kinds of applications to this and this is one of the funny little topics actually that I get into debates with about my colleagues. 

We're looking at the academic side of this stuff. So it's easy to look at things like the sun going from solstice to solstice throughout the year. Okay, well, that's how you measure a solar year. The moon going through phases and it's linked with tides, right? You can, that's practical knowledge. 

We can all think of easy ways that could be applied. But you look and there'll be discussions about variable stars. So stars that slowly change and brightness over time, whether it's two stars moving in front of each other and one diminishing the other one out for a brief period of time or whether it's something intrinsic about the star. Some supergiant stars will expand and then contract when they expand and become brighter. Or even things like an eclipse or the lunar stand stills. 

Like the lunar, the moon does its own version of the solstice every month, but over a course of 18 years waxes and wanes about how far apart those lunastices are. Well, it'd be easy for academics to say, well, there's no practical application for that. So why would cultures be interested? They wouldn't be. They don't care about that kind of stuff. That's something we're looking at. 

No. The meaning of that doesn't necessarily have to be something that ties to calendars or food economics or something or predicting the weather. It can mean whatever the communities decide it means. So the stories that talk about stars changing and brightness, those brightness changes are not on a cycle that synchronizes with the solar calendar or lunar calendar or seasonal calendar. So they don't have that kind of practical function, but people still noted these stars change in brightness over time. So they attributed meaning to that. That was personal. So they described like, you know, one character was breaking a sacred taboo and was punished for it. And so that star changing in brightness reminds you of the activity that he did that he wasn't supposed to. So it had social meaning to it. 

Tripp: Which reinforces a law which has some other purpose in society, which all contributes to survival. 

Duane Hamacher: Exactly. You know, we talk about eclipses and the Torres Straight islanders were able to predict eclipses. You know, and that's something that no, no oral based culture has been given credit for anywhere in the world. We know the Maya did it, the Sumerians did it and a few other cultures did it. They had some kind of physical writing system written language. 

The cultures that were already based were never given credit. Even when I say the [Torres Straight] islanders did that, people still scoff at me today. Prove it. 

Well, as I said, the proof is in the pudding. They have a whole ceremony that is planned in advance that only takes place during any eclipse. And they love this ceremony to try to impress a bunch of astronomers. 

I mean, it's absurd. These ceremonies, you know, recorded when the first people, you know, first Europeans came to that part of the world. But what I'm getting at is like, well, what's the practical application of observing an eclipse? Well, let's put yourself within one of these big civilizations like you might see in China, India, Mesoamerica, someplace like that. 

Right. And some of these places you have big powerful kings. And these kings hold this position of extreme power. And as is very common, astronomical goings on at significant importance. They would like an astrological terms that could tell you something about your future. Eclipses were seen as a very powerful omen. They've literally stopped battles during eclipses because they felt it was a sign from the gods or something like that. So if you're a powerful king and you want to know if an eclipse comes is going to come up because that's going to influence something you should be doing or the influence of the people or religious influence. Your court astronomers had damn well better predict that eclipse accurately because if they do great. 

If they don't, they're probably going to walk around with that ahead. Death is the result of that. So your ability to do that is not so much based on, oh, is it calendars or is it finding food? It's based on life or death because this powerful person says so. So, you know, this is one of those discussions I have with other academics about what this means and why it's important that you can clearly see it in these traditions. 

People observed the most rare types of transient phenomena and difficult to predict type of common like eclipses. They did that. Amazing. And the evidence for it is as clear as anything else. And those are the kinds of things I really wanted to emphasize in this book. And to give a little bit of context, I gave a talk for an education conference in the middle of the year, middle of this year for physics teachers. And I decided instead of talking about eclipses and the solstice and things that they would easily recognize, I wanted to bring up something that was going to be a little bit more of a challenge for them. So I brought in eclipses. 

I talked about these Torres Straights ceremony and what it means and how this ceremony was only performed during the eclipse. It had to be planned months in advance. It not only was planned months in advance, it was the top level of initiation for the traditional [Miraim Language], which means Starman. 

It was their top level of initiation to be able to predict when this was going to happen. So I said, how do you predict an eclipse? Let's just do a lunar eclipse. 

How are you going to predict that? And I led them step by step through the process of how you're going to predict the lunar eclipse. And even the physics teachers were starting to feel a bit lost. 

And that was deliberate. Because they think, and I think it happens a lot because people don't know what they don't know. I did that on purpose because I wanted them to feel a bit lost. I wanted them to realize this is not something easy. And if calendars did something incredibly difficult, and even they as physics teachers were going to struggle to do this, that's a little bit better of a way of getting people to understand the complexity and depth of knowledge. 

Tripp: And one of the cases of priority that you talk about in the book that was striking to me, I think it was the variable brightness of Betelgeuse. So there's a very famous 

Duane Hamacher: song line that goes across the entire continent called the Seven Sisters Songline after the Plays. And a song line is a song map in the landscape where you associate memory to place. 

Something called the method of loci. So as you're traveling these routes across the country, you're singing the song. And the song is describing the land around you and where things are and what's happening. So as you're traveling over long distances, you're singing the song, it's reiterating these things. 

Even if you've never traveled the route before, the map is embedded in memory. You're reciting through the song. And if you cross into another country, another Aboriginal area, the song changes languages. It's a very famous one that goes all the way across the country from WA to New South Wales Coast, about the Seven Sisters. And in this narrative, it's talking about the Sisters of the pleiades and their interaction with a man called, you know, various things, Wati Niru, Nairuna, who is represented by Orion. And he's chasing those sisters across the landscape. 

And it's this dynamic of what it all means and why they're doing it. Orion's chasing the Seven Sisters, but their eldest sister is protecting her younger sisters by standing between them and this man in Orion. And she's the stars of the Hades, that V shape of stars, which we see as the horns of Taurus of the bull in Greek tradition. And she's sort of taunting him and getting his attention away from the girls, her younger sisters and towards her. 

And she's like mocking and humiliating him because he's this cowardly womanizer. Throughout the actions of what she does to him, they're throwing fire magic back and forth, but he creates a fire magic in his right hands, which is the star of Betelgeuse. Now, people think, well, hang on, Betelgeuse in the southern hemisphere is underneath, so that means he'd be upside down. He is. The Aldous community say he's upside down. 

Central part of New South Wales, they say he was, this particular individual was haunting a kangaroo and he tripped and fell over the horizon. He creates a fire magic and he's trying to throw it at her to get her out of the way so that he can get to the sisters. And then she creates fire magic in her left foot, which is the star of Aldebaran. 

She kicks fire magic back in him. It kind of goes back and forth. And they describe the stars getting hotter and brighter. And then going back down again and describing these stars changing in brightness over time, mostly with the focus on Betelgeuse. Of course, if you're an astronomer and you know nothing about variable stars, which is what I did my master's degree on, you recognize Betelgeuse is a supermassive star that changes in brightness over time. On a period of about 400 days, it goes by, I think, one and a half full magnitudes. 

So it changes noticeably. And then people recognize that and they incorporated that into their oral traditions. And then, you know, Westerners recorded this, you know, those particular stories, early 1900s, but they didn't know anything about them. These anthropologists and people writing this down, they didn't know anything about variable stars. Describing those terms, they just described these stars getting hotter and brighter and they kind of mentioned their brightness changing. 

They didn't quite know what that meant. So going into the research is like, oh, this is what they're talking about. You know, with the eyes of an astronomer, it's obvious, it's clear as day what they're talking about. And when I published a paper on that, you know, there were a lot of people who were quite excited. Even the president of the American Variable of Stars Association, global organization for that, personally emailed me and said they loved it. But I got a lot of pushback from amateur astronomers, not a lot, just a few of them who thought that this is ridiculous. Every single people didn't observe variable stars, rah, rah, rah, rah, rah. 

And no matter how much I tried to explain in detail the traditions and how they work and why it all could be done, it just didn't believe me. And then about a year later, I don't know if you remember this from back in 2019, 2020, just before COVID hit, Betelgeuse went through a really bizarre time called the great dimming where it dropped from being the 11th brightest star to like the 22nd brightest star or something. It was noticeably fainter. So it's on a global stage. This does happen. You can see with your own eyes. Step outside now. You can see it, you know. 

Tripp: Yeah, because part of the argument was that there wasn't enough change to be able to detect it with the human eye. 

Duane Hamacher: Yeah, and what that means is about every six to seven months, if you look at it six to seven months apart, you'll notice the significant change in the brightness. There's a lot of significant, but one and a half magnitude is pretty noticeable. But what you need are nearby stars comparison. If you have an isolated star in the sky like Canopus, it's hard to judge brightness changes in Canopus because there's no other bright stars around. It's the second brightest star anyway. But in something like a ride, you've got lots of stars around of comparable brightness where you can, the human eye is really good at detecting changes in brightness. So if you were to ask people to list the five brightest stars in Orion, the majority of people will get it bang on, right? 

Because we'll do that quite easily. So you had to have those stars, which you have there. And that just was a great way of showing how that worked. And then we found more. We found more evidence in other cultures. 

But the one that I'll finish on real quick is after the paper was published, I sent it to one of my PhD students at the time. And he said, you're not going to believe this. I was like, what? And he actually calls me up. 

I was on the train and sitting at the time. He calls me up. He says, just four days ago, I was sitting with a senior elder down outside Canberra who was talking. And in their cultures, they talk about how there was a community who had been attacked by another one. 

There's only a handful of them left. And they actually ascended into the sky. And the father ascended into the sky. He was pulled up by the younger kids and he had an injury signifying blood. And the elder says, oh, that star changes today. 

It pulsates slowly. Now, Bob didn't mention the PhD student Bob Fuller, who's now a doctor Fuller. Didn't mention anything to the elder about variable stars. That wasn't something that was brought up or described. Didn't even know about the paper I was writing. 

Just totally serendipitously. Another community talking about that star changing, but the elder literally saying this star pulsates slowly. So right from the horse's mouth, not even from something that was written down a hundred years ago or something, you know. 

Tripp: It set back the discovery of that for thousands of years, right? Which is just an incredible thing. Maybe now is a good time to return to the cover image on the book. Absolutely. 

Duane Hamacher: So when it came time to figure out what the cover was going to look like, the publisher, you know, like, look, rubbing for ideas. What do you want to do? And I really thought about this and the obvious choice would seem to be an astronomy related cover. 

Maybe an Aboriginal artwork or something. And I thought, well, hang on. I've got lots of experiences with the elders and it was one that I really liked. And that was with Uncle Segar Passi. So Segar Passi is the senior elder on Murray [Island]. 

He's in his 80s. He's a world famous artist. There's a few other artworks with his and that middle bit where the color images are. 

You can see some of those. He doesn't do an old, what do you think, of the traditional design. He's got his own artistic style and he's got a beautiful palette of colors. He uses it. 

I love it. But what I thought of was the time when I was sitting with him on mayor in his art studio, which the community built for him, which is really nice. He had some artworks on the wall and we were chatting at the time about how both of us love sunsets. 

For both of us, it's our favorite time of the day. And he was sitting on his front porch where his studio is and he'd sit there in a lawn chair and he was talking about how he would be watching the sun throughout the year. He'd see where it was setting relative to the houses and the light pole and things across the street. You know, he was noticing that. 

And he explained to me that he had this artwork which showed the sunset and it just dawned on me. That's the perfect image. First off, I want it for exactly the reason that you noted. It catches the eye. 

It pops out and needs something that's going to pop out. That's going to be an indigenous artwork that isn't going to be one everybody automatically associates. This is not a dot painting, for example. Most people think of them. They think of Aboriginal art. 

They think of dot paintings. The significance behind that is when you're looking at astronomy from an indigenous perspective, it doesn't start when the stars come out. It's when the sun sets. Where does the sun set on the horizon? What time does it set? What do the clouds in the background look like? 

It's going to tell you about the weather or the climate conditions. So I thought, here's something. We both love sunsets. 

This is the time when you want to start doing it. A bumper of the book with all the stars in the middle, but on the edges is the sunrise, the sunset kind of thing. It's a great image that's going to pop out. 

It's one of the co-authoring senior elders who's on there. Everything worked out beautifully. We got that art design and sent it to him and he loved it. He absolutely loved it and he was so happy to have that on there. 

Tripp: What an incredible artist. He's capturing the details in a way, the way that he observes, the stuff that he pays attention to, the appearance of the sea surface, the colors in the sky. It's gorgeous and it has so many meanings. I just thought it was really powerful and the more you learn about it, the cooler it gets. 

Duane Hamacher: That's exactly right. And this thing is by all those artworks. I keep looking over here. I've got these artworks lined up in my wall that are from his. The first one there is actually one of the book cover. 

Every brush stroke, every color, every single time his brush touches that painting, it has meaning. Wow. Telling you something. They're filled with meaning. They're gorgeous because the scenery there is gorgeous. He's a great artist, but they're all localized. 

They're all from his community, which is mostly on Dowar, one of the two little islets off the coast of Mer. And it's just stunning. But everything with his artwork tells you something important. That's the thing that I think people, when they're interested in indigenous art, especially when I buy a piece, it's not just about the aesthetics. Yes, of course, it's an artwork. A set of this is a big part of it, but it's about the meaning and what it's telling you, which is one of the things I love about the artworks. 

But I hate when I go into a big art shop in the middle of the city where the only thing it tells you is tells you the artist, the name of the artwork. And then like, oh, it's either the dimensions and it's this kind of canvas or something. It doesn't tell you the meaning of it. 

Tripp: Like you said, with the dot artwork, it seems so abstract. So if you don't catch the meaning behind it, you're kind of missing most of the point of it. Yeah, so one other topic I wanted to hit is meteorite impacts. I know this is a favorite topic of yours to chapter in the book. 

You touched on it like right in the beginning, but traveled out for one of these documentaries to one of the big meteorite crater sites where the scene of one of the indigenous creation stories. 

Duane Hamacher: That is from the Western Arrernte people. So the Arrernte people are the communities around Alice Springs, right in the central desert. And there is a gigantic asteroid crater about 130 kilometers west of Alice Springs. 

The Western term for this Gosses Bluff the Arrernte term for it is Norala. And the what you see today is the remnants of the central uplift of this giant complex crater. So what happened in terms of science, geology is about 142 million years ago, rather large asteroid probably on the order of a kilometer in diameter impacted, created this giant crater about 22 kilometers wide. Now over the last 140 million years, that central part of Australia has eroded down, the ground used to be two kilometers higher than what it is now. So over 140 million years that ground is eroded away by two kilometers. 

And what happens to these really big impacts that are over about 3.4 kilometers wide is you form what are called complex craters, the simple craters, the bowl shaped craters, complex ones are kind of flat. And what happens with those is just like when you drop water, a drop of water, you know, in glass, you see it kind of go down the middle part comes back up again, the sort of conservation principles of energy, right. Well, the ground does the same thing. 

So they kind of rebounds and comes back up. What happened over 140 million years ago is the ground eroded down. But the area with the central uplift was more dense. 

So didn't you wrote as fast as the land around it. So what you see nowadays is this ring shaped mountain range, five kilometers wide, and about 150 - 200 meters high. That's the central uplift. You look at a sidelined image, you can see the wide to kilometer 22 kilometer crater, but now you just see this ring shaped mountain range. 

This mountain range is called Norala. Now in the Arrernte traditions, the Western Arrernte traditions from the Malbunka's who were the traditional custodians of that story. They talk about how in the creation time, at the very beginning, there were a group of women who were dancing in the Milky Way as stars. One of the women who had had a baby, she put the baby down in a turner, a coolamon, a wooden basket down at the edge of the Milky Way. And while they were dancing the corroboree, the ceremony, the vibrations shook it and the baby's flip and fell off the Milky Way and came crashing down to the Earth. 

It hit the ground and the turner fell on top of it and pushed all the rocks around it upwards. Now the baby's parents are the morning star and the evening star and they take turns back and forth, searching for their lost child to this day. It was said that parents out in the desert would tell their children, don't stare at the morning star or the evening star Venus. 

It was visible in the morning and the evening because that's the baby's parents and they'll think that maybe you're the lost child and they'll come take you above. So I did this documentary for National Geographic. It was called The Story of God with Morgan Freeman. And they wanted me to work with them as a consultant on an episode called Creation. And they wanted to do something in Australia. And I said, well, how about we do this? They contacted me and said, what are your ideas? 

Do you have anything? I was like, yeah, well, here's a story out here and this would be a great one to do. The filming team came down and we went out to the desert and we filmed this with Warren Williams, who is one of the traditional custodians. In fact, I think he's the CEO of the Central Land Council now. He's also a famous country musician. And when I went and visited him and now it's spring, we were at the studios and I mentioned I was a drummer and he's like, oh, we've got a drum set in here. Do you want to go play it? And I was like, please, so. 

First time meeting this guy, I'm in the studio banging on a drum kit. We had a lot of fun with that. But he, he, you know, we were out in the desert doing this, this filming. He was sharing knowledge with me about things I had researched before. 

I didn't know, but I expected. And one thing he says, if you look up high in the sky and what we think of as winter, when the Milky Way straight overhead, you can see that turn of still falling out of the Milky Way. It's a curve of stars, a U shaped curve of stars called Corona Australis, which means Southern Crown. But to him, you know, the traditions that look like that turn of falling sideways out of the Milky Way. So that was he confirmed something that we've been thinking there. So it was a really amazing experience to see that. And you know, millions of millions of people saw that and that was their creation. That was where life came. That's where the first people came from this impact, this impact of this star that fell, which mirrored the scientific explanation of that. You know, was their creation story. 

Tripp: It's a beautiful story. And these are people of the stars, right? Like that's where they came from. Other books, if people want to go further or get deeper into your topic. 

Duane Hamacher: There's a whole load of things coming out now, which is fantastic. Two Aboriginal colleagues of mine wrote a book at the same time called Astronomy Sky Country. It's Karlie Noon and Krystal De Napoli. Yeah, we were both working on our books at the same time. There's has quite a different, you know, different approach to it. But they speak more from their perspectives as two Gamilaroi women. And that's a great one to see as part of the First Knowledges series, which is, you know, initially it was only going to be six books. Now it's going to be double that. And I might actually be writing one of the final books in that. 

Tripp: Amazing. Yeah, I've actually seen those around. I haven't picked one up yet. 

Duane Hamacher: Yeah, I just had a meeting with the phone conversation with the chief editor just about just before we picked up the phone or just before we had our meeting here. That'll be a lot of fun. There's a lot of other books coming out on this topic. There is a great book called, well, Lynne Kelly's Books. 

That's the ones I want to mention. Lynn Kelly has done books on memory and orality, and that gives all the context to how all this stuff works and why it works. The memory code, which talks about how all these famous archaeological sites work as memory palaces like Stonehenge and things like that. 

And her work is solid, you know, it's revolutionized archaeology. Memory craft, which are the different techniques for memorizing stuff. And there's the knowledge gene, which is the new one that just came out where they worked out the actual gene and within our DNA that gives humans the unique capacity for music and art that helps us be able to learn that. 

It actually what makes us human. That's a phenomenal book and it just came out like a couple of months ago here in Australia comes out in the US early in the new year. And that's going to revolutionize everything. So those are great books to check. There's some other great books on indigenous astronomy as well. Arctic Sky by John McDonald's all about Inuit astronomy from the Arctic and Alaska, Canada, Greenland, those areas. There's Sam Lowe's of Hawai’ike Rising, which is a great book. 

It's called The Spirit in the Sky, which is about Lakota knowledge. Of course, my colleague Annette Lee who's a Lakota woman and artist in international physicists who I think has seven degrees. She's writing some books and curricula. There's so much amazing stuff that's happening out. 

Tripp: One of the premises of the podcast is that science books can play a role in society and making positive change. So could you sum up what you hope people will take away from your book? 

Duane Hamacher: There is a tremendous amount of things that we can learn from indigenous knowledges that are scientific. It doesn't matter if they're scientific. They shouldn't be considered valid because they're scientific. But there's amazing ways that we can learn from indigenous knowledges if we learn to close our mouths and open our ears. That's the main takeaway from all the work that I've been doing. There's research programs we're doing where elders are being involved in guiding astrophysics research because these worlds can inform each other in really remarkable ways. We're not talking about astrology or something super esoteric. 

We're talking about real practical stuff too. So there's great synergies that are happening in the space. And now that we're working on humanity expanding its presence into space in a really rapid way, how can we work together to make sure that everybody benefits from this boom in the space industry? Also, how can we safeguard these knowledges so it's not being exploitative? How can we safeguard a view of the skies and darkness and still move forward? 

Tripp: Yeah, given the history of colonial science, we have to keep that in mind. Exactly right. What about you mentioned maybe a next book? 

Duane Hamacher: A whole load of new projects coming. As far as books, I just signed a book contract with Murdoch Books, which is part of Allan and  Unwin, to write a sister companion to Marcia Langton's Welcome to Country. We're going to call it Welcome to Sky Country. And hoping to have that in by April, which means it'll come out a year later. We'll see how we go. A lot of stuff happening right now. 

Tripp: Is this who, she wrote the fordward in your book? 

Duane Hamacher: The book is a phenomenal job and she's extremely famous here in Australia. She's written tons of books and everything. She's the associate provost and foundation chair of indigenous studies here. She's an Eoman woman from Queensland. 

She pretty much needs no introduction for in by in Australia. We got this amazing cultural and indigenous astronomy program at the University of Melbourne going and the new course is finally the final course. We'll be up and running first semester. 

So if you're still around, come join. It's called Astronomy and Society in the Space Age. And it's looking at all these questions about astronomy research and the space industry and all the philosophical and sociological questions we need to ask about that with a bit of a focus on indigenous rights and knowledges, but ties in with indigenous astronomy, archaeo astronomy and astronomy and world history, which the other three courses. And then of course, middle in July of next year, we have a major IAU funded symposium for a week here at the University called Indigenous Astronomy in the Space Age. And it's going to be on this very topic. 

Tripp: Amazing. So where can people best find you and support your work? 

Duane Hamacher: You can go to aboriginalastronomy.com.au. That's a resource that our website have put together for all the educational resources and academic papers, that kind of thing. You can find us at Australian Indigenous Astronomy on social media, Facebook and Instagram. And you can find information about the book at thefirstastronomers.com. 

Tripp: Amazing. There's so much in the book. We didn't even scratch the surface. So if you're listening and you're enjoying the conversation, you really need to go out and buy the book. This has been Duane Hamacher. 

We've been talking about the first astronomers how indigenous elders read the stars, written by himself in elders and elder knowledge holders. Duane, thank you so much for your time. This is, I think, it's a really fun, incredible conversation. Thank you. 

Duane Hamacher: Well, thanks a lot for having me on. I appreciate it. 

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