Custodianship of Sky Country and Sydney Observatory
First Nations communities hold deep knowledges and connections to the skies which have developed over millennia. These observations and living records predate the oldest ‘Western’ observatory in Australia, the Sydney Observatory. It’s time for First Nations custodianship of Sky Country to guide the stories that Sydney Observatory tells.
Situated on Gadigal land, the Sydney Observatory has a strong documented history of its colonial beginning, detailing its historic astronomical and weather monitoring achievements by the men and women who contributed to its establishment in 1858 and its activities ever since.
Being the highest point in Sydney, it is more than probable that First Nations people have been observing and communing with Sky Country from this location for hundreds of generations.
Its precise traditional history has been concealed due to the interruption of colonisation, leaving mostly speculation as to the site’s original significance to Traditional Owners. It is possible the original cultural significance has been subject to deliberate colonial erasure, such as that of another cultural site just meters away documented at Dawes Point, when rock carvings of a shark and man were destroyed during the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Dawes Point was also home to the first (makeshift) Observatory after British settlement, established in 1788 at the foot of what is now known as Observatory Hill.
Gadigal woman Patyegarang, often noted as a friend of William Dawes, an English Lieutenant and astronomer, recorded the pair's conversations in what remain as the only known first-hand accounts of the Gadigal language.
Patyegarang taught Dawes local words for the sun (Go-ing) and the moon (Yan-nă-dah). Patyegarang additionally knew the names of the two Magellanic Clouds that are orbiting the Milky Way galaxy and only visible from the southern hemisphere. She told Dawes their names were Bu-do—nong and Cal-gal-le-on. Her ability to describe these prominent but obscure astronomical features in the night sky shows an incredibly sophisticated local knowledge of them. The information she provided Dawes led to the first and probably only colonial recorded account of Gadigal Sky knowledges.
