Hi Rod,
Short answer: no!
Long answer: still no, but a bloke named Duane Hamacher (University of NSW)
is the Australian guru on Aboriginal astronomy, and has published
extensively on this. I haven't had time to trawl through his stuff to see
what he says about telling time, but there may be something in his
publications (http://www.nuragili.unsw.edu.au/profileduanehamacher.html)
FYI, I have a paper in press refuting a suggestion by a local Aborigine that
stone walls near Jindabyne (southern NSW) were erected by Aborigines as an
astronomical alignment. They are dry stone walls erected as fences in
difficult terrain. The European landowners may have used Aboriginal labour
(paid a fraction of what whites were paid!), but there is no way that the
walls are alignments. However, if you look at Hamacher's papers you'll find
several which document stone arrangements which are astronomical.
Cheers, John
John Pickard
john.pick...@bigpond.com
-----Original Message-----
From: rodwall1234
Sent: Sunday, March 08, 2015 9:56 AM
To: John Pickard ; sundial@uni-koeln.de
Subject: Re: Telling time in outback Queensland in the early 20th century
Hi John,
Thanks that is interesting. I have always though about how our Australian
Aboriginals determined time. Do you have any information on that?
Regards,
Roderick Wall.
John Pickard <john.pick...@bigpond.com> wrote:
Good afternoon,
List members may be interested in this account of how some boundary-riders
in Queensland kept time in the early 1900s:
"Many boundary-riders do not even possess a watch, their only timekeepers
being the sun and the stars. Some judge by the shadows. I saw one who had
pegs stuck in the ground, at a radius of 10ft, all round a tree. There were
ten of them standing exactly one hour apart, so that the shade, lying
across
the first at 8 a.m., would be on the last at 5 p.m. A swagman with a watch
had camped with him one Sunday, and between then they had constructed this
crude sun-dial. Once when passing a camp, I asked the boundary-ride the
time, and was amused at the manner in which he obtained it. Taking a small
twig, he broke it into two pieces about 3in long, and, holding his left
hand
palm upwards, he stood one piece between the second and third fingers, and
the other between the third and fourth. Then, facing due north, he held his
hand straight out before him and I noticed that the shadows of the twigs
were just a trifle east of a direct north and south line '"Bout, 'alf-parst
twelve," he said. "
http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article71523046
A boundary rider was a station employee who lived far from the homestead,
and whose job it was to ride along fences to check for breaks in the wire,
etc.
Of course, telling the time with the 10-foot radius circle using the shadow
of a tree would be "as rough as guts" (in the Australian vernacular), but
it
probably made little difference to the boundary rider. However, at least
some early outback Australians understood the geometry of sundials. See my
description of a dial made out of galvanised iron:
Pickard, J. (1998). A 19th century vernacular horizontal sundial from
outback Australia. British Sundial Society Bulletin 98(1): 26-29.
Personally, I prefer using CIA-time via my GPSs. Not as much fun, but way
more accurate.
Cheers, John
John Pickard
john.pick...@bigpond.com
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