The Best Australian Science Writing 2014 (36 page)

05
first tools                                 Carl Sagan searched Midtown for stones to record

spalling not rolling

but the city sold knives and its roads were unknappable

he might have known it was too simple

such reduction would require samples                                 experts, goggles, gloves

06
morse code           di-dah dah-di-dit, stars through hardships, to the stars

sh-star star-sh-ship           through the hard           to the tsars

07
horse and cart           before horses turned into Saturn V rockets

they were Lucky and Daisy, collared to the endless schlep of things

prehensile lipped, crumping hay and snickering at the moon

08
morning star song, Venus rising                                 comet dust string

to a lorikeet dawn, ironwood fire cracking, reverberation of the verse

stringybark                      sugarbag                      lines of song

09
queen of the night aria           accompanied by city lights

anyone can be queen of the night                                 star sequins

           dagger, drag, delusions of colorature

10
the fifth                                 four-notes-of                                 THE SUN

DNA, cells dividing, double helix uncoiling                      upper strings

ribs, continents drifting, dunes           sequoia, snowflake, rush hour

variations on                      wasp, spindled shell, dolphins leaping

Golden Gate Bridge, man with machete

book page, swan sun                                            horns floating through space

11
flowing streams           plum-blossomed ch'in

silk-stop-strumming the water's course

heard and understood only by Chung Tzu-ch'i

and so the world's last reader of poetry

upon whose death all strings will unriver                                            or so we like to believe

12
dark was the night           his blade slid on strings, boy eyes burnt

hot coins in his tin                                                                                                   Texan sky, crab gumbo

this moaning life, everything a sort of guddling

then back into the gyre, like he ever left it

another spinning sun                                                                                forgotten stylus at record's end

Firefront

Beyond the ‘Morning Star'

Beyond the ‘Morning Star'

Alice Gorman

In September 2013, evidence suggested that the NASA spacecraft
Voyager 1
had finally crossed into interstellar space after a 35-year journey. It carried with it a golden record containing sounds, images and music from Earth. Its sister craft,
Voyager 2
(following roughly 3.5 billion kilometres behind), carries an identical record.

The records were designed to encapsulate the aural heritage of Earth in 90 minutes – but some preliminary investigation reveals that there were a few inaccuracies in the official NASA documentation about the golden records.

When senior Aboriginal men Djawa, Mudpo and Waliparu gathered one night in 1962 on Milingimbi mission in Arnhem Land for a recording session with Australian anthropologist Sandra Le Brun Holmes, they little dreamt that their music would be heading to the stars. But more than a decade later, when American astronomer Carl Sagan put together a committee to discuss a ‘time capsule' for NASA's interstellar mission (which would be launched in 1977), astronomer Frank Drake suggested including a record rather than a plaque (as had been used on the earlier
Pioneer 10
and
11
craft). Suddenly, music was on the table.

The process of selecting this ‘world music' is described in
Sagan's book
Murmurs of Earth.
Many factors determined the final cut: the quality of the recording, cultural diversity, geographic and chronological range. The ultimate hope was that the records could represent not only human culture, but also human cultural evolution.

* * * * *

In 1962, Le Brun Holmes and her husband, filmmaker Cecil Holmes, toured Methodist missions in the Top End. At Milingimbi, as she recalls in her autobiography, people would come to visit her after the day's work was over:

During such evenings […] I recorded a number of beautiful songs, didjeridu solos and stories from the men. One man named Mudpo was a virtuoso on the didjeridu, able to make the sounds of birds at the same time as the wonderful resonant music rolled on uninterrupted. There were fast songs and slow, ghostly music about
morkois
(ghosts). These men were masters of the instrument. It was the best music I had ever heard, in the true classical, ceremonial tradition.

So who were these master musicians and custodians of their culture?

Djawa was a well-known community leader and artist: a winner of the 1955 Leroy-Alcorso Textile Design Competition, numerous of his bark paintings are held by the National Museum of Australia.

But Djawa's voice did not make it onto the golden record: we only hear him playing clapsticks under Mudpo's didjeridu in ‘Morning Star'. And first searches of Australia's most easily accessible historical archives reveal almost nothing of the lives of Mudpo and Waliparu. In fact, there is little trace of them beyond
the sleeve notes of the record Le Brun Holmes later released as
Land of the Morning Star
. One reason for this may be multiple different spellings of their names, a common problem when European ethnographers tried to convert complex Aboriginal sounds into English. To find out more about them, we would need to dive deeper into mission records and talk to the families of these men and other people who knew them.

* * * * *

In
Murmurs of Earth
, Sagan writes that the two songs were recorded in 1958, and that their 1 minute, 26 seconds on the golden records included ‘Morning Star' and ‘Devil Bird'. However, Le Brun Holmes' first visit to Milingimbi occurred in 1962. And when the golden record is compared with that original recording, it becomes clear that while the didjeridu and clapsticks (played by Mudpo and Djawa respectively) comprise the first 23 seconds of the track – with Djawa's vocal cut off – the remainder is not the ‘Devil Bird' song at all. It is Waliparu singing ‘Moikoi'. The details of Waliparu's life may prove elusive, but his voice is now immortalised in a way that few others can claim. He is a kind of astronaut, disembodied, but still speaking into the void.

‘Morning Star' itself is a clan song or
manikay
relating to the
Barnumbirr
morning star ceremonies – such songs were not unlike title deeds, expressing the relationship of families or clans to areas of land through the ancestral spirits. The ceremonies are about the journey of the souls of the dead to the land of the morning star. In comparison, ‘Moikoi' is about the malicious spirits (the
morkois
) that try to entice newly deceased souls away from their clan country.

The songs, in their new context of the spacecrafts' voyage, could perhaps be read as a message about the journey of the human spirit between Earth and space – and coming home at last.

* * * * *

This is how Sagan summed up the purpose of the golden records in 1978, the year after their launch:

Our concern with time and our sense of the
Voyager
message as a time capsule is expressed in many places on the record – greetings in Sumerian, Hittite and !Kung, photographs of Kalahari Bushmen, music from New Guinea and from the Australian Aborigines, and the inclusion of the composition ‘Flowing Streams', whose original structure antedates Pythagoras and perhaps goes back to the time of Homer.

Interestingly, the indigenous groups mentioned here are among those most often singled out in early anthropology and popular conceptions as the most ‘primitive' on Earth. They are mentioned in the same breath with long-dead cultures known mainly from archaeology. But these were not dead and dying cultures. Throughout the 1950s, '60s and '70s, Yolngu people in Arnhem Land were fighting to maintain their land and culture against an onslaught of missionisation, mining, and exploitative art dealers.

In 1962, when the recording was made, Aboriginal people were still subject to the pernicious assimilation policy that supported the stolen generations and denied them just wages for their labour. In the 1970s, the decade of the
Voyager
missions, assimilation was superseded by self-determination – yet the rights of the Yolngu people were easily discarded when mining interests were at stake. Even now, in the 2000s and 2010s, the battles against government policies go on.

Le Brun Holmes does not mention the
Voyager
missions in her 1999 autobiography,
Faces in the Sun
. In 1977, when the probes were launched, she was busy campaigning for Davis Daniels, an Aboriginal man from Roper River who was standing for
election in the Northern Territory. Perhaps Djawa, Mudpo and Waliparu never knew that their music had swept past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, and – as of September 2013 – into interstellar space, on
Voyager 1
.

But in contrast to Sagan's well-meaning conception, this music is not the preservation in copper of a vanishing way of life. It is a mark of the resilience and adaptability of Aboriginal culture, as it sails out of the solar system, far, far beyond the morning star.

The eye in the sand

Liner notes,
Voyager
Golden Record

The oldest known star

Bianca Nogrady

Astronomers have discovered the oldest known star, born in the fiery wake of a first generation supernova after the big bang. The star, which goes by the catchy name of SMSS J031300.362670839.3, came to the attention of an international team of astronomers because its unique chemical fingerprint showed it contained almost no iron.

Lead author Dr Stefan Keller says the first generation of stars that formed immediately after the big bang contained mostly hydrogen, helium and a small amount of lithium. ‘They were made out of this very primordial mix of hydrogen and helium and that led them to become very massive stars, hundreds of times the mass of the Sun,' says Keller, a research fellow at the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australian National University. ‘When you have a star that big, it lives fast and dies young. They explode in a supernova and they start to seed the rest of the universe.'

The resulting explosion contains heavier elements, such as carbon, silicon and iron.

‘As soon as we've got a little bit of iron in the universe, that enables much smaller stars to form and that's what we're seeing in this finding – one of those stars from the second generation,' says Keller.

The star, which is drifting around the outskirts of the Milky Way around 6000 light years from Earth, offers a remarkable snapshot of conditions in the early universe.

‘Imagine you've got a first [generation] star that's popped into existence; it's a huge, massive thing. It explodes and then the shockwave from that drives the wind out and forms the star that we're observing,' he says. ‘Stars act as little time capsules and when they form they encapsulate this chunk of gas from that time in which they formed. When we find a particularly old star we have this sample of the universe as it was close to the formative phases of the Milky Way.'