The Boorong
Sky-Stories
Lake Tyrrell takes its name from a Wergaia word for the sky itself. The Boorong people — who in 1857 taught the colonist William Stanbridge their star lore, reciting it as they pointed overhead — were known for holding the deepest astronomy of any group in the region. Here are a few of their stars to carry with you. Read them aloud on the walk and under the dark, and the night sky stops being scenery and becomes something you can actually read.
Vega is Neilloan, an ancestral mallee fowl. Her movements in the sky keep time with the real bird on the ground: as she sinks low after sunset, it's the season the mallee fowl build their mounds and lay. If you wander into Wyperfeld, you may meet her living descendants scratching at their great sandy nests.
Find the Southern Cross. Its top star is Bunya, a possum who scrambled up a tree to escape Tchingal, a giant emu — and stayed there as a star. The Boorong didn't only read the bright points of light: beside the Cross, in the inky Coalsack where no stars shine, they saw Tchingal himself. Reading the darkness as closely as the light is part of what made them such fine astronomers.
Arcturus is Marpeankurrk, who in the old stories found the bittur — the wood-ant larvae that were good to eat. When she stands high in the evening sky in late winter, it's the season to gather them; when she leaves, the bittur are gone too. A star kept as a dinner bell.
War is the Crow (the star Canopus); Collowgullouric War is his wife. In the 1840s the star we call Eta Carinae flared into one of the brightest in the whole sky — and the Boorong folded that brand-new brilliance straight into their tradition as the Crow's wife, ringed by her children. Stanbridge could only jot it down as a large red star he couldn't name. It is the only known record by any Indigenous people on Earth of that great eruption — proof their sky-knowledge was alive and watching, not frozen in the past.
The twin stars Castor and Pollux are Yurree and Wanjel, two young hunters — chasing Purra the kangaroo, the star Capella, around and around the sky for all time.
The Southern Cross rides high in the south on a winter night — start there for Bunya, and the dark shape of Tchingal beside it. Look low to the north for Vega, and the long curl of Scorpius overhead holds yet more Boorong stars. Give your eyes twenty minutes to adjust, and the Milky Way — doubled on the salt below you — will do the rest.
With respect: the Boorong clan no longer exists as a distinct group, and Stanbridge's 1857 record is very nearly all that survives of their star names — though Wergaia descendants live across north-west Victoria today. These stories are shared here in that spirit: with gratitude, and lightly held.