Skycountry. a cosmography is the working title of one of Merrill Findlay’s contributions to the Big Skies Collaboration, a literary non-fiction book.
“I grew up on a family farm in Central Western NSW between two important astronomical sites: Seven Sisters Ridge on our western horizon and the Parkes Radio Telescope to the east,” Merrill explains. “The first is associated with the Pleiades cluster of stars, or Mulayndynang, and has been of great astronomical significance to Wiradjuri people for at least 2,000 generations. The second emerged from a sheep paddock near the town of Parkes during my childhood. I have since discovered that there are hundreds more astronomical observatories in my part of inland Australia, including many world-class telescopes, and yet more sites of significance to First Peoples and other groups. Together these observatories constitute what I’ve called the 700 Kilometre Array. My new book will explore some of the histories of these iconic sites and introduce some of the people who have gazed at our Southern Sky from them in search of answers to the biggest questions humanity can ask.”
Skycountry will be a very accessible first-person account of the 700KA, its peoples, landscapes, its great unpolluted sky, and the astronomers who’ve used the observatories in the C20th and C21st to explore and understand our universe. The book will draw on documentary research, ethnographic fieldwork, and numerous interviews with professional and amateur astronomers, engineers, technicians, farmers and townsfolk, including descendants of some of the diverse Northern Hemisphere migrants who first settled the Inland in the C19th.
Merrill’s project has taken her to China’s Pearl River Delta (February 2018) to experience the Lunar New Year and visit some of the hometowns and villages of the Cantonese migrants who settled in the Inland in the C19th, and, in May/June 2019 to Fujian Province, Beijing, and to the flood plains of the Yellow River system to understand more about China’s ancient astronomical heritage.
Merrill is now planning a third visit to China to visit some of the C21st observatories that are now using Australian technologies, including FAST, the Five hundred metre Aperture Spherical Telescope, the largest single-dish radio telescope on Earth.
Photo caption: Winter Solstice sun rising over Seven Sisters Ridge, the Wiradjuri astronomical site associated with the Pleiades and the Seven Sisters Dreaming, near Merrill’s family farm. Photo by Merrill Findlay, June 2015.
Page created 26 June 2016. Last updated 30 January 2020 to add a link to my blog post ‘My Seven Sisters Dreaming‘.
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