Taungurung News

In the course of my work at Monash University I recently came in contact with Paul Curnow a renown astronomer at the Planetarium in Adelaide. Paul is passionately involved in promoting the Indigenous people of Australia as the very first astronomers.

Paul will be presenting a talk about Indigenous Astronomers at 8pm on Wednesday 8th October 2008 at the National Herbarium Building, Birdwood Avenue, Botanic Gardens, Melbourne. All are invited.

Find out more about Indigenous Astronomers from the following websites.

Aboriginal astronomers see emus in the sky.

http://www.abc.net.au/cgi-bin/common/printfriendly.pl?/science/news/stories/s1437646.htm

and

Aboriginal Skies

http://sa.apana.org.au/~paulc/loreaussie.html

Posted by Loraine Padgham at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Aunty Jean Williamson recently delivered a welcome to Taungurung Country at a Department of Human Services conference presented recently at Kilmore.

Here is some of the feedback from the organiser of the conference.

What an amazing woman Aunty is and you have to know that she drew everyone in the room close to her with her beautiful natural Welcome from the heart. There were a lot of people from large Organisations and Managers from the Department of Human Services who have all seen a lot of Welcome to Country's - but Aunty impressed every single one of them with her honest and sincere Welcome. I spoke with a number of the delegates from the meeting both at the conference itself as well as back here at the office yesterday and every single one of them smiled and said how amazing Aunty Jean was - hearing Aunty talk of her personal life was just so refreshing, and wow, you should have heard the roar of laughter when Aunty made a funny comment, she captivated everyone's attention.

You can contact Aunty Jean on jean.williamson_@taungurung.net (you will need to remove the _ before the @ sign.

Posted by Loraine Padgham at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Members of Taungurung Clan participated in the making of a traditional possum skin cloak. The cloak project is sponsored by Monash University's Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies and the finished cloak will be used in ceremonial activities at the University. With the ban on obtaining Australian possum pelts, the pelts used in the cloak were obtained from New Zealand where possums threaten the New Zealand indigenous wildlife.

Irene Lawrey and others modelled the partially completed cloak for a group of volunteer workers also present at the venue. It was explained that each pelt represents a teaching area of the University. Completed pelts include depiction of pharmacy, geology, archaeology, business, computing, hydrology and neurology.

Margaret Martino is shown burning in the design onto the pelt. After first sketching the design using either charcoal or light pencil, the pyrographic burner is used to carefully trace over the design leaving singed lines.

Jean Williamson, Loraine Padgham and Sandra Smith from the Museum Victoria were intensely concentrating on the stitching of the cloak. For this cloak, blanket stitch was selected because it created an interesting definition between pelts.

Posted by Loraine Padgham at 02:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)