by Duane Hamacher
Hamacher, D.W. (2011). WGN - Journal of the International Meteor Organization, Volume 39, Issue 3, p. 58.
In response to the letter by Gorelli (2010) about Hamacher & Norris (2010), he is quite right about Aboriginal... more
In response to the letter by Gorelli (2010) about Hamacher & Norris (2010), he is quite right about Aboriginal people witnessing impact events in Australia. There are several oral traditions regarding impact sites, some of which were probably witnessed, as Gorelli pointed out. The Henbury craters he mentions, with a young age of only ~4200 years, have oral traditions that seem to describe a cosmic impact, including an aversion to drinking water that collects in the craters in fear that the fire-devil (which came from the sun, according to an Elder) would rain iron in them again. Other impact sites, such as Gosse’s Bluff crater (Tnorala in the Arrernte language) and Wolfe Creek crater (Kandimalal in the Djaru language) have associated impact stories, despite their old ages (142 Ma and ~0.3 Ma, respectively).
In addition, many fireball and airburst events are described in Aboriginal oral traditions, a number of which seem to indicate impact events that are unknown to Western science. I have published a full treatise of meteorite falls and impact events in Australian Aboriginal culture that I would like to bring to the attention of Gorelli and WGN readers (Hamacher & Norris, 2009). Although our paper was published in the 2009 volume of Archaeoastronomy, it did not appear in print until just recently, which is probably why it has gone unnoticed. Recent papers describing the association between meteorites and Aboriginal cosmology (Hamacher, 2011) and comets in Aboriginal culture (Hamacher & Norris, 2011) have also been published, and would likely be of interest to WGN readers.
I heartily agree with Gorelli that oral traditions are fast disappearing, taking with them a wealth of information about not only that peoples’ culture, but also about past geologic and astronomical events, such as meteorite falls and cosmic impacts (a branch of the growing field of Geomythology). There is an old saying that ‘when a man dies, a library goes with him’. This is certainly the case in Australia, and along with Gorelli, I encourage WGN readers to get involved in studying meteoritic events in oral traditions. There is a lot of information regarding meteoritical events and phenomena in the literature that is still waiting to be collected and analysed ...and I applaud McBeath for his pursuit to publish this material through the successful Meteor Beliefs Project!
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