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Explorers of the Southern Sky: A History of Australian Astronomy. Raymond Haynes, Roslyn Haynes, David Malin, Richard McGee. xiii+527 pp. Cambridge University Press, 1996. $90.
Here is the history of astronomy in Australia, compressed into one substantial and attractive volume, full of variety and good stories. The authors are, respectively, a radioastronomer, a historian, an astrophotographer and another radioastronomer. No doubt the astronomers helped with the facts, but the masterly hand of the historian is apparent throughout.
We begin by learning that the Australian Aborigines, as far as records testify, were the world's first astronomers, that their system of the world descended without interruption for 40,000 years, preceding by far what little survives from precivilization in the turbulent Mediterranean. Several beautiful paintings convey a sense of the astronomy of people for whom clear night skies were part of their territory. An aboriginal visiting the Southern Cross is aiming a spear at the Coalsack, whose eerie dark depths might well harbor something dangerous. Today you must leave town to see the Coalsack or even the Milky Way, but the finest details of the southern sky, unobstructed by shelters, were intimately familiar to the Australian nomads, watching nightly
In 1821,...