Cosmic Dreaming

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Traveling at perhaps 20km a second, the giant mass of iron and nickel crosses western Australia in under a minute and dives into the atmosphere, its path traced by the hiss and crackle of electrophonic noise, echoed by thunderous sonic booms as the air slows it through the sound barrier. Around it an envelope of ionized gas produces an incandescent fireball, brilliant as the sun, hot enough to vaporize the metal until what's left - as massive as a battleship and some 50m across - drives itself at more than 20,000 km an hour into the desert floor. At the point of impact, monstrous kinetic energy is converted almost instantly into heat, turning the meteorite into a spray of molten metal, pulverizing the ground beneath, fusing sandstone into glass. A crater nearly a kilometer in diameter and 150m deep, its sides molded from softened rock, cools in the flat, hitherto featureless, landscape.

It was a spectacular end to a 4.5-billion-year journey. Formed at the same time as the planets of our solar system, the extraterrestrial missile originally lay at the core of a small asteroid. Then, some time in its voyage through the silent vacuum of space, a chance collision with another asteroid shattered it, sending this fragment hurtling toward its meeting with Earth 300,000 years ago.

It would be another quarter of a million years before the first humans set eyes on the crater. During that time, sand blown on the desert winds filled most of the crater's depth, although its bottom still lies 25 m below the level of the surrounding plain. For thousands of years the local Aborigines in this arid stretch of the southeastern Kimberley region, members of the Jaru and Walmajarri tribes, have known the crater as Kandimalal. Here on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert, Dreaming tracks meet and cross, and while traditional ownership is shared between the tribes, their myths, told and retold over the generations by different family and gender groups, offer a variety of accounts of the crater's creation.

Barbara Sturt, of the Jaru, sits beneath a tree in the yard of Halls Creek's Yarliyil Arts Centre and points to her dazzlingly bright canvas. "Here are the Rainbow Snakes," she says shyly, tying her tale to a myth that features in almost all Aboriginal cosmology. "They go in here, and everywhere they come up they make a creek or billabong." The snakes are believed responsible for much of Australia's topography, moving under the ground, carving waterways, coiled and sleeping under hills and mountains.

Water is precious in this country, and knowing where to find it allowed Sturt's nomadic ancestors to flourish for tens of thousands of years in an environment so hostile it might have been some divine practical joke. While her painting is not a map in any conventional sense, Geoff Vivian, community development officer for the shire of Halls Creek, speculates as to its provenance. "I think scientists will one day find," he says, that there's "sophisticated hydrographic knowledge" embedded in Aboriginal myth. Maggie Long, another Jaru painter, has popped into the arts center to chat to manager Meg Norling and catch up with other artists. As grinning barefoot toddlers tug at the visitor's clothes for attention, Long spreads a glowing acrylic painting on the floor. "This is where the star man came down," she says, her hand passing gently over a path of pink and yellow dots falling from a half-moon into the crater, which is viewed, as landscapes are in many Aboriginal paintings, as if from above. "He went in here," she says, jabbing at a blue dot slightly off-center. And though the ancient people who first told this story could never have known how close their falling-star story was to scientific truth, the desert's night sky is so black - and the shooting stars so brilliant against it - that even the city-bred feel their imagination expanding.