Bhathal: AboriginAl skies

The Aboriginal people of Australia have lived for well over 40 000 years on the Australian continent and their descend-ents still enjoy the wonderful spectacle of the Milky Way galaxy directly overhead. In that long period they built an astronomical knowledge sys-tem that they absorbed into their social, cultural and religious life. They passed this down in oral form from one generation to another as a living system of knowledge which they still cherish and enjoy. The astronomical knowledge system they constructed is different from that of modern-day physicists and astronomers. It is not based on the hypothetico-deductive system that physicists and astronomers use and validate by observation and experiment; rather it is a knowledge system based on other knowledge traditions – traditions that do not require or are not amenable to falsification of its tenets because it is socio-cultural astronomy