Big Skies Collaboration brings together arts practitioners, astronomers and local communities to creatively explore and celebrate people’s relationships with the cosmos and catalyze new cultural, social, educational and economic opportunities in southeastern Australia’s rural and remote Inland.
Our wish is that the Big Skies Collaboration’s creative interventions will bring lasting benefits to the communities involved, and perhaps even transform people’s lives. Because such is the creative power of the arts and sciences.
LATEST NEWS
6 April 2024: Wiradjuri Condobolin Corporation hosted its fourth SKYFEST: Miima-gu ngaanha, with support from Lachlan Shire Council, Arts OutWest and other partners, at the Wiradjuri Study Centre, in the small inland town of Condobolin.
SkyFest was established in 2018 through our Big Skies Collaboration. We held a second event in 2019 and a third in 2022 after the Covid lockdowns. Our Collaboration’s goal was to ensure that Wiradjuri Study Centre had the capacity to, as soon as possible, organiser and host this event without our support. And, in 2024, with the appointment of a new Wiradjuri member of staff, Nicole Smith, they were able to do this – as you can see from their Facebook page and website. A astronomical achievement! Our mission is accomplished!
Congratulations to everyone involved in SkyFest 2024! It was a great privilege working with so many gifted people in Condobolin and elsewhere on this project over the years, and to see our hopes fulfilled. For the latest updates see Facebook.com/Condo SkyFest
WHY IS OUR CONDO SKYFEST MIIMA WARRABINYA SO IMPORTANT? Wiradjuri Condobolin Corporation’s CEO, Harold (Ally) Coe, and Big Skies Collaborator Dr Merrill Findlay explain why Condo SkyFest Miima Warrabinya (as it was then called) is so important in their Statement of Purposes 2022. With this community document, we can now legitimately call SkyFest an evidence-based cultural event co-curated to achieve a long list of cultural, social and economic benefits. Read the evidence here >>
NACAA 2022: BSC’s Dr Merrill Findlay presented the final talk at NACAA 2022 hosted online by the Astronomical Society of Victoria in April. She inspired participants with a progress report on several Big Skies Collaboration projects, including our two recent anthologies, Condo SkyFest Miima Warrabinya, and the Inland Astro-Trail.
22 January 2022– INLAND ASTRO TRAIL: a new interactive map (draft only) of our expanded Inland Astro-Tour routes is now available here >>
Our two anthologies, Dark Sky Dreamings: an Inland Skywriters Anthology and Outer Space Inner Minds, published by Interactive Publications, were re-launched by Dubbo Regional Council’s Mayor, Clr Stephen Lawrence, as part of the Dubbo Fringe Festival in 2021. Press release here >>
Totality along the Inland Astro-Trail: the 2028 Eclipse. Read Stuart Pearson’s article, The Sky’s the Limit With Astro-Tourism (Western Advocate 2 January 2020), on what the 2028 eclipse could mean for inland communities >>
3 April 2019: Read novelist and Big Skies Collaborator Tracy Sorensen‘s long-form essay, Staring At The Sun, about her visits to the Birmingham Solar-Oscillations Network (BiSON) observatories at Carnarvon, Western Australia, and Narrabri, New South Wales. Tracy, a non-scientist, reflects on her efforts to ‘get’ the science of solar seismology in a way that will make you smile, perhaps even laugh!
Birmingham, UK, May 2019: “Australian novelist writes about life at University of Birmingham’s solar observatories,” the headline reads.
The article continues: “Two of the University of Birmingham’s most remote solar observatories are featured in a long-form essay, Staring At The Sun, by Australian novelist Tracy Sorensen, published on the Big Skies Collaboration blog.” Says Steven Hale, BiSON Instrumentation Engineer at the University of Birmingham, “Tracy has done an amazing job of capturing the atmosphere at Carnarvon and Narrabri and the beauty of the clear inland skies. I hope her essay inspires a sense of wonder in readers and encourages more people to take an astro-tourism holiday in south-eastern Australia.” Read more here >>
So have you gazed at our big dark unpolluted inland sky in wonder and awe as we have? Have you asked the big questions the stars, planets and other celestial bodies provoke? Do you have compelling stories to recount about your own or other people’s relationships with the cosmos? Do you want to share them? Yes? Then please tell us and become part of our Collaboration too.
Australia’s First Peoples began observing the sky when they arrived in southeastern Australia’s Inland at least 65,000 years ago. Within the last few hundred years people from all over the world have settled the Inland and marveled at our Southern Sky through the lenses of their own cosmologies: ‘Western’, Chinese, Arab, Persian, Indian, Pacific Islander, for example.
Professional astrophysicists and astronomers are now exploring this same sky in new ways, while amateur astronomers and casual stargazers are observing celestial phenomena with their own telescopes or their naked eyes from hundreds of backyards, footpaths, farms and park lands throughout the Inland.
Big Skies Collaborators have been working with some of these communities to creatively interpret star stories through music, song, dance, physical theatre, the visual arts, creative writing, and/or new digital media. Expect to be excited, inspired, even provoked by the outcomes.
To learn more about our Collaboration click here and here. And/or read our blog here.
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Site history: created in January 2016 by Big Skies Collaborator Merrill Findlay. Static front page added 28 June 2016. Page last updated 17 July 2024.
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Big Skies Collaboration 