Trevor M Leaman

UNSW Sydney | UNSW · School of Humanities and Languages

Australian Indigenous astronomical traditions hint at a relationship between animals in the skyworld and the behaviour patterns of their terrestrial counterparts. In our continued study of Aboriginal astronomical traditions from the Great Victoria Desert, South Australia, we investigate the relationship between animal behaviour and stellar position...

A Wiradjuri Dreaming connected to the Aboriginal creation ancestor Baiami, and enacted during a Burbung male initiation ceremony, was recorded by the Australian anthropologist R.H. Mathews in 1896. We investigate this further and conclude that the Dreaming most likely relates to the annual movements of the constellations in the Wiradjuri night sky,...

A major focus of archaeoastronomical research conducted around the world is to understand how ancient cultures observed sunrise and sunset points along the horizon, particularly at the solstices and equinoxes. Scholars argue that observations of sunrise and sunset points are useful for developing calendars and predicting seasonal change, which is t...

Aboriginal people connect landscape to the positions of the Sun and Moon throughout the year for time reckoning, seasonal calendars, and mythology as a memory aide. This can include the rising or setting of the Sun, Moon, and stars over significant landscape features. A significant corpus of Wiradjuri (Wiradyuri) astronomical knowledge has been fra...

A novel methodology, which we call significant horizons, ranks aboriginal cultural sites according to their potential for astronomical utilisation. This is done by taking into consideration a cultural site's location and position within the environment and examines the surrounding horizon profile from that place. We rank each site on the number of...

A novel methodology, which we call Significant Horizons, ranks Aboriginal cultural sites according to their potential for astronomical utilisation. This is done by taking into consideration a cultural site’s location and position within the environment and examines the surrounding horizon profile from that place. We rank each site on the number of...

This chapter explores the ways in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples see the realms of Earth, sea and sky as aspects of a unified ‘cosmoscape’ – in which the skyworld is every bit as real as Earth, complete with rivers and forests inhabited by fish, birds, animals and ancestral beings. Certain important stars and asterisms were see...

The Wiradjuri Murriyang Project is a collaboration between Wiradjuri artist Scott “Sauce” Towney and cultural astronomers Trevor & Tina Leaman to create constellation artworks for a Stellarium add-in package based on ethnohistorical records and contemporary ethnographic studies of the Wiradjuri night sky. The same artworks are planned be used for i...

A major focus of the archaeoastronomical research conducted around the world focuses on understanding how ancient cultures observed sunrise and sunset points along the horizon, particularly at the solstices and equinoxes. Scholars argue that observations of these solar points are useful for developing calendars, informing ritual/ceremonial practice...

Like so much else that is being rediscovered about First Australians' culture, storylines and knowledge of the seasons-and behaviours of wildlife across the continent-the night sky is rich with vital information. As part of his remarkable research with the Australian Indigenous Astronomy Research Group, cultural astronomer Trevor Leaman has mapped...

Whilst camped at Ooldea, South Australia, between 1919 and 1935, the amateur anthropologist Daisy Bates CBE (1859-1951) recorded the daily lives, lore, and oral traditions of the Aboriginal people of the Great Victoria Desert region surrounding Ooldea. Among her archived notes are stories regarding the Aboriginal astronomical traditions of this reg...

Genetic variation in tree growth and branchlet carbon isotope composition (δ13C), nitrogen (N) isotope composition (δ15N) and nutrient (N, P, K, Ca, Mg, Mn, Fe, Cu and Zn) concentration of 11-year-old hoop pine (Araucaria cunninghamii Ait. ex D. Don) half-sib families were examined at two contrasting sites (31 families with 8 blocks sampled at a we...

Bacteria serologically related to Leifsonia xyli ssp. xyli, the causal bacterium of ratoon stunting disease (RSD) in sugarcane, were detected using the fluorescent antibody direct count on filter (FADCF) technique in grasses in eastern Australia. In a survey of 191 grass, sedge and bullrush samples comprising 53 plant species, 90 (47%) of the sampl...

A new serological assay for detection of the RSD pathogen Clavibacter xyll subsp. xyli is described. In the evaporative-binding enzyme-linked immunoassay (EB-EIA), xylem extract from a piece of sugarcane stalk is dried onto the surface of microplate wells before processing with an enzyme-linked immunoassay procedure. EB-EIA can detect down to 5 X 1...