Deadly Dialogues: Karlie Noon and Celeste Carnegie

Jeremy Ambrum: -all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people. I'm Jeremy Ambrum. I'm an Yidinji Bundaburra man from Atherton Tablelands, far North Queensland. And yes, I am cold down here in Ngunnawal country. I'd like to pay my respects as well to the old people as well. They guided us all here tonight, and to you who made it here tonight, thank you very much. Here at the Library, I'm the Programme Manager in the Indigenous Engagement section, we work across the Library strategically and operationally, building the grounding of the Library, supporting its capability to deliver programmes and services of the highest order based on a commitment of practises that ensure cultural authenticity, integrity, and authority. And the Deadly Dialogues is an opportunity to action these to celebrate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and their journeys, and acknowledge the diverse cultures of First Nations peoples through in conversation style events.

Following this conversation, there will be a Q&A and a book signing up in the foyer too. So let me introduce our guest facilitator tonight. She's a tech communicator, advocate who drives digital inclusion within First Nations communities. With over 10 years of engaging communities, she's a passionate advocate, fostering relationships and developing impactful programmes, directing her expertise to provide STEM education and digital upskilling for First Nations peoples, empowering communities for the digital age, envisioning a future where First Nations peoples confidently navigate the tech landscape and actively contribute to reshaping the industry's narrative. An innovator who inspires change and challenges the norms to pursue a more inclusive and diverse tech future, Celeste Carnegie.

Celeste Carnegie: That makes me sound real deadly.

Jeremy Ambrum: And with Celeste tonight is an accomplished scholar from the Kamilaroi Nation in east of Australia, with degrees in mathematics, physics, and advanced masters of astronomy, and is currently undertaking a PhD in astronomy at the Australian National University. She uses her extensive experience in science, communication, and media to advocate for the importance of Indigenous stewardship and astronomy in space practises. With extensive experience across various media platforms and the recipient of numerous awards for leadership and research impact, co-author of the acclaimed book, 'First Knowledges Astronomy: Sky Country', Karlie Alinta Noon.

Now if we look to the screen, we'll see the name Jeremy Ambrum is nowhere to be found, so I'm going to stop talking and leave it to the Gammon Guild's very own Celeste and Karlie Noon. Enjoy your deadly dialogues.

Celeste Carnegie: Oh, well, hello everybody. Thank you for coming today. It's a Wednesday. I hope everyone's feeling good in the middle of the week. I know I'm just waiting for Friday, as usual. As Jeremy, that was a lovely introduction, so thank you for that. But I'm Celeste. I'm a Birrigubba Juru and South Sea Islander woman from North Queensland. My family come from the Burdekin. I don't know if anyone's heard of the Burdekin, it comes as a small town called Ayr and Homehill. They're sugarcane towns.

But yes, I come from two groups of people, one who was displaced and the other one who was part of a slave trade. If you don't know much about South Sea Islanders in the country of Australia, then yeah, you can Google it, do some research, but a lot of history there as well. Any rundown you want to give us?

Karlie Noon: Sure. Hello, Yuma, everyone. I am a Kamilaroi and Raradjuri descendant. I was lucky to grow up on Gamilaraay country in Tamworth, New South Wales, hometown country music capital of Australia, in case you didn't know. It's very happening in Tamworth. It actually is. It's grown a lot since I was a young one in the nineties. And yeah, I'm the astronomer, the science communicator, at least I try to be, really hard. About halfway through my PhD at the moment, but yeah. My beautiful mother is here tonight, so thank you for being here, mum. Don't cry. And yeah, I just want to thank you all so much for being here for supporting Mob in general and the Library as well. It's not very often you get to work with people that you really love and admire, so it's really lovely to be here tonight.

Celeste Carnegie: Yeah, and we've known each other for how long now?

Karlie Noon: It's been a few years, hey.

Celeste Carnegie: Yeah, I want to say two. See, you know when you meet those people and it's just so natural that you don't even know when you met and you feel like you've known each other for a long time?

Karlie Noon: Yeah.

Celeste Carnegie: That's definitely this. And I think when it comes to women in STEM, which is our connector in the world of the professions and the disciplines, that is definitely. I think we met through the Powerhouse Museum.

Karlie Noon: I can't even remember, to be honest.

Celeste Carnegie: Yeah. Anyway, but when you are a woman in STEM, especially when you're an Indigenous woman in STEM, there's only so few of us. And so when you do finally connect, you don't get long.

Karlie Noon: Yeah.

Celeste Carnegie: You don't get long because then you've got to get back out there and represent the Mob because there's not many of us doing it. But when we do connect-

Karlie Noon: And it's women in STEM, but also Indigenous women in STEM.

Celeste Carnegie: Yes.

Karlie Noon: Right?

Celeste Carnegie: Yeah.

Karlie Noon: An extra layer, which just kind of makes it less likely to meet someone who you can relate to on that level.

Celeste Carnegie: Yes, yes.

Karlie Noon: But yeah, I do remember now. I do remember meeting.

Celeste Carnegie: Yeah.

Karlie Noon: And it was maybe like 2016.

Celeste Carnegie: Yeah. Which is actually quite a long time, a lot of time has passed.

Karlie Noon: Yeah.

Celeste Carnegie: But yes, so that comes with its whole own thing. But in terms of the STEM journey, everyone's journey into STEM is different. You've got some people who are high achievers in school and know their path and are just rolling through it. And then you've got some of us, like myself, who didn't really think technology and working with community at the same time was a plausible option for oneself.

So it's crazy to think now that from someone who only thought they were good at sport, because I was an athlete for a while, I was a netballer. For someone who was just good at sport and only thought they were good at sport, ending up in the career I'm in now is a bit crazy. That I can do what I love and what I'm passionate about and get paid to do it with people that I like doing it with, which is my community. But yeah, do you just want to give us a rundown? I know it's a big rundown.

Karlie Noon: Yeah. I'll try and keep it short.

Celeste Carnegie: Yeah, yeah. Of your STEM journey and the path that you took getting into STEM, and even in your book, you wrote your personal perspective around how philosophy even influenced that.

Karlie Noon: Yeah. So I think I can very much relate to, I did not do well at school. School was pretty rough. It was pretty hard. I was always kind of behind or trying to catch up and it just gets to a point where there's just too much to catch up on. And so I was never a high achiever, never really seen at school, which often happens to people who don't do particularly well. You just aren't seen by your teachers. But I was really lucky, I had an aunty who would come and teach me maths, and if you've read the book, you would've known all about this or heard me talk before. And she really gave me a lot of confidence in maths. I didn't have much confidence in anything, and she just made it fun. And she took a lot of the pressure away that we can kind of experience at school. It wasn't about the marks, it wasn't about doing better than other people, it was just having fun.

Celeste Carnegie: Yeah. Yeah.

Karlie Noon: And learning along the way. And making her proud as well, right? She kind of embedded this, when she saw me get something right, she would just have this big smile on her face and she'd go and tell my mum and go and tell grandma, and you want to make your people proud. So I was really lucky to have that from quite a young age. And to do that kind of one-on-one tutoring, it really, really benefited me. And I know that it benefits a lot of Mob who maybe are a bit too shy to speak up when they're not following or to ask questions.

So yeah, tutoring has had a really big impact on my life. I ended up leaving school in year eight. My Nan passed away at the time, I was about 13 and life was just a bit too much, a bit too hard. School was much harder put on top of that, and so I ended up leaving, and I went into TAFE. And going into TAFE, it's a lot more independent learning, and I would think I was a lot better suited for that type of learning. And I really flourished there because I was able to learn things that were better suited to my level. I didn't have to kind of stick with a very rigid curriculum and you know learn the same things that the rest of the class was learning. I could learn the stuff that at the level that I was at. I really, really did quite well.

And so by the time I was about 16, I was learning at a level higher. So I was in about year 10 and I was learning at a year 11 level. And they were like, "Girl, you need to go back to school. We can't teach you anymore." So I was like, "Well, I really want to learn more, so..."

Celeste Carnegie: You're kicking me out.

Karlie Noon: I guess I'll go back to school. And I'm really glad I did. But even going back, I didn't do particularly well because I had had big gaps in my education. They put me in the low classes again. And even though I really strongly advocated for myself, I was like, "No, I'm really good at maths, I want to do science," it didn't work out. But that was okay. I persevered through general maths. I found it quite dull for me because I wasn't being challenged, and I think that's really important. If you're just learning the same things over and over again, what's the point. And so I didn't engage in it very much, I didn't do very well, but I did good enough. I did good enough. I got an ATAR of about 57. It wasn't great, but it was enough to get into uni. And that was kind of the goal. I wanted to go into uni. I started doing ancient history actually. I loved ancient history. I loved Ancient Egypt since I was a little kid. I'd be reading those big colourful, like gold Egyptology.

Celeste Carnegie: Yes.

Karlie Noon: And wizardology?

Celeste Carnegie: Yes.

Karlie Noon: I loved those books growing up. And so I went into ancient history thinking, "This is for me." And the first lecture, it was on Julius Caesar and I fell asleep, and no offence to Julius Caesar, he had a very colourful life, but I was just-

Celeste Carnegie: Yeah, not for me.

Karlie Noon: It was just not for me at that time. And I think if I went into it now, I would find it very interesting, but it just wasn't for little 18-year-old Karlie.

Celeste Carnegie: Yeah.

Karlie Noon: And so I started looking around. I did some English, I did some religion and sociology, and I did philosophy. And I learned in philosophy that it's actually very similar to maths, and this was not something that I had known before. But in philosophy, you use things like logic tables, which is a very rigorous way of determining a conclusion or a truth. So it's quite similar to a scientific practise or a mathematical practise. And I was like, "This is really cool, I quite like this," because it's so definitive, right? It's like this is the answer. And I was really looking for that. I was looking for something concrete and I was like, "Well, what's more concrete than mathematics, right?"

Which is actually silly now because mathematics and physics can be really quite abstract and not concrete at all. But I didn't know that back then. And so I went into it. It was pretty rough. I had no advanced maths skills, I had no physics, I'd never done physics in my life. I spent the two months before starting uni, over Christmas, doing like Khan Academy courses, doing year 11 and year 12 maths and physics and trying to quickly learn as quickly as I could. And I did okay. I passed a few courses, I failed a few courses. But I was okay with that. I kind of expected to fail, coming with no background. But I really enjoyed it at the same time. So that's kind of what kept me going. It was really stressful. Uni's stressful, regardless of what you do. It takes a lot of motivation and a lot of effort to stick with a university degree, whatever it is.

Celeste Carnegie: It is. I couldn't cut it. I couldn't cut it. It wasn't a learning environment that suited me, especially when I was one of five women in the class and I was only black fella in the room too, or a person that looked like me. So it was just very, dealing with all of that before I could even learn was the hard part. And uni's not for everybody.

Karlie Noon: Yeah.

Celeste Carnegie: That's what I tell myself.

Karlie Noon: Yeah, it's not. It's really not.

Celeste Carnegie: It's not for everyone. But it's not. And some of us are equipped to just get out there into the workforce. And I've met plenty of people along the way who went straight from high school, straight into workforce and just killed it. And that was very much suited to them. And so I guess even looking at all the black fellows in my life and all the paths they took, and my family and my friends, luckily, and I know that it's a privilege and it's a luxury to have good role models as well in your life. But yeah, I still think that's something that I struggle with today in terms of maybe I should go and get a degree just to have one, but then I don't really think that serves me.

Karlie Noon: No.

Celeste Carnegie: Yeah.

Karlie Noon: I don't think it does.

Celeste Carnegie: Yeah.

Karlie Noon: And I think what is important is that we have options. You spoke about being an athlete for a lot of your life. I don't know if you can tell just looking at me, but I'm not an athlete. I never have been. And I would wag sports class to the extent I was terrified of sports growing up. And so I was so lost. What are my options? I can't do sports. That's never happening. 

Celeste Carnegie: Yes. Yeah, okay.

Karlie Noon: And so it's like having the options and I'm just really lucky that I found something that I vibed with so well and that got me through the horrible time that is undergraduate studies, and managed to come out the other side. But if I didn't have to do that, I wouldn't. I would not put myself through that if I didn't feel like I have to. And I feel like it's really important that we acknowledge not everybody needs to go to uni.

Celeste Carnegie: Yes.

Karlie Noon: Right? It's about finding the thing that fits you, that brings value and joy to your life. And I think for that, it also, you need to be adding value back. It needs to be this reciprocal situation you're in so that you can stay motivated and stay passionate, and adding value to other people's lives. And if you can find that, who cares if you have a degree or not.

Celeste Carnegie: True. True, true. And I feel like it's also difficult too because the options, there's no awareness of options for young black fellas about what they can do. And that's part of what we do now, which I think is really cool. And to be like, "Here's all these other things that are out there." And we know we're deadly at sport. We know that. And that's pretty cool too.

Karlie Noon: Absolutely.

Celeste Carnegie: We've got some really great fellas and some really cool teams and doing some really cool, and playing some really cool sports, and representing us with excellence. But there's all these careers and these opportunities out there that we just have no idea about. And most of the time, and those opportunities need to be brought to our attention when we're in school because it's really hard when you leave and you've got no direction, you don't know where you're going, and all you've been told is, "You can only do this," or you are only seeing certain pathways available to you.

So I think whilst my time in netball wasn't a very happy time in the long run, I had some great memories from it, but it's just I needed sport to put me on a path of the tech because I got into tech through my ability to facilitate workshops and collaborate with people. That's how I got into tech. It wasn't through me going down a technical route. So it was me being able to run workshops and facilitate and do trainings and work with young people. And then that's what set me on the path of upskilling communities and technology. And so I think when it comes to pathways in tech, and that's why I like to remind our young people, and just in STEM in general, there's no one way and you don't actually have to be a high achiever at school. And I think we both have that similar experience in just being the problem child or the difficult student, when really we were just poor.

Karlie Noon: Yeah. And just didn't have any options.

Celeste Carnegie: Yeah, we didn't have any options. So yeah.

Karlie Noon: And I think it's really interesting, when you enter a field that is so underrepresented, there's such a severe under-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in academia in general, let alone the extra layer of STEM. So sorry, I should also say, if you don't know what STEM is, science, technology, engineering and maths, we haven't really been able to enter these arenas until very recently. And when you have a field that is so under-represent [video skips] until someone enters it, right?

So for example, no one was really talking about Aboriginal astronomy 15 years ago. I had had conversations with elders about some sky knowledge and some stories, but in the broader Australian psyche, it wasn't really something that was acknowledged. In academia, it had definitely been touched on, and there were certainly some people who were pioneering that and pushing for the recognition of that, but more broadly, it wasn't a part of the national conversation. It wasn't a part, and you look today and it's a part of the curriculum now, so there's been this really huge just celebration of our knowledges, our peoples, our cultures, the sophistication in it. And I think that's really only happened since Indigenous people have started becoming a part of that conversation. And I feel like it's very similar in your role. You don't really know what you can bring to the table or what Mob can bring to the table until you actually have Mob at the table.

Celeste Carnegie: Yeah.

Karlie Noon: Right? And so you learning the skillset of engagement and facilitating, this is something that is often lacking in a lot of spaces, but that's somewhere where you shine.

Celeste Carnegie: Yes. Well, because in my head, all I'm thinking is community is best served by community. That's where I was coming from, that's my intention with the work that I do. Community led, community designed, community driven. So that's where the love for working with community started and also thinking about this whole untapped industry of technology that people, like we don't even know we have access to that community, that industry, and there's a lot of money in tech. And so we're also missing out on are you on this whole.

Karlie Noon: Absolutely.

Celeste Carnegie: Which can change people's lives.

Karlie Noon: Yeah. And does.

Celeste Carnegie: Yeah.

Karlie Noon: But for Mob, I'm first in family to go to university. I'm one of the first to finish school, and just by doing that has completely changed, like I have a little cousin who just finished year 12. That was unheard of when I was growing up in my family, to even go to year 12. So it has such a big impact back home, what we do.

Celeste Carnegie: When did you, I'm just realising now, so when you were at university, because I want to hear this, yeah. When you were at university, you were in philosophy, I guess, what was that deciding, like what was that thing that just pushed you into astronomy?

Karlie Noon: Yeah, I think it was that, because I had never really engaged with the sciences, never really engaged with society much in general, to be honest. We were really poor. We didn't really watch things like Cosmos or anything like that. I was really not exposed to physics at all. But I think that was actually a really big benefit to me because I didn't make any assumptions about physics or science or anything like that. I had just been exposed to this field through philosophy.

We were exploring different theories of creation. And so we looked at obviously Christian theories of creation. We looked at all the different religions, not all of them. There's a lot, but some of the different religions. We looked at the science theory of creation, so looking at the big Bang, looking at the multiverse theory. And that was really my first exposure to studying physics.

And so I was just like, "Oh, this is really cool." I didn't know that this was something that only men really had access to. I didn't see any of that. I was just like, "Oh, this is really cool. You can actually study that here at the uni. So why am I not studying that? I find it really cool." I was so naive at the time, but that really-

Celeste Carnegie: We've all been there.

Karlie Noon: It was a really big benefit that I hadn't been exposed to all of the assumptions we kind of make about scientists or physicists, these ideas that you have to be a genius and a particular type of person. I just didn't know about any of that. So I was just like, "Look, this is really cool. I'm just going to do it. And YOLO, who cares? We'll see how it goes."

And then I just loved it. I loved the process. I loved seeing myself get better and better at something, having such a hard thing, like such a hard challenge and spending days on it, and then eventually being able to solve it, and just seeing that progress happen and learning about how our world works, how the universe works. I was just like, "This should be fundamental knowledge. We should all have access to this." I was really entitled, to be honest. I was like, "Why do we not all have access to this?" And I still have that entitlement today.

So there's a lot of conversations happening at the moment around who is really entitled to go to uni these days? And of course we have difficult economic times that are inspiring this conversation. But another thing that's really inspiring this conversation is AI. And so we're kind of at this situation now where AI is becoming very close to outperforming students, if not just completely outperforming them in general. And so there's kind of this thought like, "Well, why would we have students when we have AI?" And I think it's a bit silly because we all have a right to education. We all have a right to this knowledge. It shouldn't be kept away in this ivory tower, where only a select small percentage of people are entitled to have access to it. That's just not how things should work.

We've seen that happen in the past. We've seen it happen now, and it's just, I think we have the resources and the opportunity to move beyond enforcing inequalities. Because that's what you do when you say, "Okay, you can go, you can go, you can go," you are choosing the one based off a lot of prejudice and a lot of bias. And so I think we should all have access to it, we should all be studying it. And really that's what allowed me to enter it in the first place. Not because I'm a genius, not because I did particularly well or anything like that, and I'm still here today, not for any of those reasons, but just because I'm really a little bit entitled, a lot stubborn, very, very stubborn. They couldn't get rid of me. And I just kept going. I just didn't give up.

Celeste Carnegie: And was there a moment where, like was it, did you stumble upon astrophysics or astronomy? Or was it like, were you looking up at the sky one day and you were like, "I want to learn about you?" You know what I mean?

Karlie Noon: Yeah. No, no. I am kind of envious of the people who can be like, "Oh, I always loved astronomy." No, that was not me at all. I wanted to be a wrestler.

Celeste Carnegie: I love that.

Karlie Noon: Yeah. I used to love WWE and would watch it with my mom, and I wanted to be a wrestler. And I used to wrestle with my dad and my brother on the trampoline, and I love that. I was like, "Yeah, this is really cool."

Celeste Carnegie: I don't think we've had an Aboriginal wrestler.

Karlie Noon: We do have some. We do have some. They're out there. But no, no, I was never heaps into, I obviously adore the sky, I had always adored the sky, but like I adored the land. It was never really that different for me.

Celeste Carnegie: No, yeah.

Karlie Noon: But how I stumbled upon it was, so when I graduated and finished year, sorry, not year, finished my first degree. So I did a combined Bachelor of Science, Bachelor of Maths, and I majored in physics and pure maths at the University of Newcastle. And it turned out I was the first Indigenous woman to have both of those degrees in Australia. There was a man who had gotten those degrees in WA a few years prior to that, but it was kind of a moment for the universities, I think, in them ... So this is back in 2016, so really not that long ago. And when I heard that, I was kind of appalled. I was like, "Why am I not the 10,000th person to do this?"

And it brought a lot of attention onto me. And as a black fella and you kind of get a camera in your face, it's kind of like "you're Aboriginal and you're doing the science, what can you tell us about Aboriginal science?" And again, I'd heard a few stories that an uncle had told me growing up and a few years prior to that, but I was like, "That's a really good question", and maybe that's why I'm not the 10,000th, because Science has never at all been remotely inclusive for us or considered us to be involved.

And so I teamed up with some people who had been working in this space, a professor. He had reached out to me and he was really excited. He was a non-Indigenous man or is a non-Indigenous man working in this space in academia. And he was just so thrilled because he had kind of been waving this flag for a long time that Indigenous people have so much astronomical knowledge in their culture, and why are we not talking about this? He had been advocating for it for so long, and so to have an Indigenous person in this space was quite exciting to him. And we started working together. This is when I started doing a lot of work looking at moon halos.

And so this was a really exciting time for me because I was able to combine my knowledge in physics. I started learning a lot about atmospheric physics, which is really, really interesting. You're learning a lot about clouds, different temperatures, optics, which is a really fun field, all these different areas of physics that I'd never really gone through deeply into. And so I was learning all this stuff, but I was also learning about a lot of Mob stories, different traditions, ways that Mob predicted the weather using this type of phenomena.

And so that kind of kicked off my interest in astronomy. And I started, before that, I'd been doing a lot of science communication, working out in communities. I would go around Australia many times a year out to very remote communities promoting science, promoting STEM, doing the very typical kind of Questacon style science shows, like big explosions, lots of chemical reactions, really fun stuff. And had been doing that for years. But then as I started to get more into astronomy and learning more about our culture, I was like, "Why am I not sharing our culture with Mob?" And it was obvious because I didn't know it, at the time, I'd never really had much access to it. And none of us really had, well, at least a lot of us never really did.

Celeste Carnegie: No, no. And I just recently read your book and going through all the stories that you were talking that linked up and connected to how things are working up there. It was just that, not that I was surprised or shocked by the sophistication of it all, but it kind of just validated, I was like, "That makes sense."

Karlie Noon: Yeah.

Celeste Carnegie: That makes sense. That makes sense that they would do that because of that. You know what I mean?

Karlie Noon: I had the exact same feeling.

Celeste Carnegie: Right? It's the same.

Karlie Noon: It's not surprised. You know it. You know it in there, but you've never been able to know the details of it.

Celeste Carnegie: No. And even just acknowledging the ingenuity and the sophistication then, and even now in my own family, and in the communities that I go to and how they operate. It's not even that it's talked about, it's just that's just a way of life.

Karlie Noon: Yeah.

Celeste Carnegie: So yeah, just reading your book, reading all those stories and how it all links up, I was just like, "Yeah." It is just like a glass shattering moment like, "That makes total sense." I don't know, yeah. And also considering and recognising Mob as experts in this field and in this knowledge and what they know, and not just like a throwaway or these Mob over here said this thing about this.

Karlie Noon: Oh, that's a nice story.

Celeste Carnegie: Yes. It's actually the longest database. I think that's mentioned in the book too. It's a database.

Karlie Noon: Yeah.

Celeste Carnegie: These stories are actually a database. These oral traditions are actually a database.

Karlie Noon: And we look at scientists in our society today, so Stephen Hawking was one of my favourite physicists and scientists. I was really inspired by a lot of his writings. He was a really amazing, incredible science communicator. And we look at these people as geniuses. We do. They are in the top echelons of society. And we have a culture here that has very, very similar knowledge, very similar knowledge base, a very scientific knowledge base. But yet historically, we have not been treated like that at all. And our old people have not been treated like that at all. And so of course, we should be treating it as expertise and as knowledge. And how else would a society survive for that long? 65,000 years, plus. How else could you do that without in-depth knowledge on your environment and your surroundings?

So I think we're at a really fun time for Mob, a really interesting time and a really exciting time because we do get to celebrate our old peoples, we get to celebrate their knowledge and their expertise, and just the generations of passing that knowledge down. Because oral traditions obviously work very differently to how we learn today. How we learn today, we look up things on Wikipedia. We Google things. We type it into AI and ask for the answer on how to solve things. Oral traditions don't work like that. They're very, very different. And just having that knowledge passed down for so long, and it's also not the same knowledge that gets passed down. As new information comes in, those stories change and those songlines change and evolve.

Celeste Carnegie: Yeah. It's very evolving. Yes. Well, because what I've learned from Sky Country, that the sky's changing over thousands of years. So they're documenting .

Karlie Noon: Yeah.

Celeste Carnegie: That was just so awesome to read that. It's also a very, very, "I come from really deadly peoples." That's how I felt reading your book too. And also, I just wanted to, while we're on the topic of your book, I just wanted to recognise that you wrote this. This is you in this book, and I just think you're really amazing for doing this.

Karlie Noon: Thank you. But I would say not really, right? I didn't write this. This is not my knowledge. This is thousands and thousands of generations who have transferred this knowledge on. And so really all I did was I went into science and I was lucky to be born with my mum and within my family and my matriarch, and be born on Country, have that strong sense of who I am and my community, have my community behind me, and have permission to write this, right?

Celeste Carnegie: Yes.

Karlie Noon: That's it.

Celeste Carnegie: That part, yeah.

Karlie Noon: And I just, yeah, anyone who had come into that position, that was their duty, that was their job. And really, it would've been incredible to grow up with this knowledge, right?

Celeste Carnegie: Yeah.

Karlie Noon: To know the importance of not just on the ground, because we know that, as Mob, you know the animals are important, you know your totems are important, you know you've got to look after your totems, you know you've got to look after the water. These are things that are very much ingrained in us from very early on. But to be able to look up, and I think it's a very important time and a very special time that this is happening as well, because it's not just Mob that are looking up now. As a world, we're looking up. We're expanding, we're going into space, and I think the manner in which we do that is really interesting, and it's really important for Mob to be involved in those conversations.

Historically, exploration has not been done in a very sophisticated manner, I'll say, and to this day, we see it being done in horrific, horrible, horrible ways. And so I think it's really important that we learn from those lessons and we have Mob sharing stories of those lessons and reminding everyone that this is really important that we get it right. We have gotten it wrong down here so many times, and to this day, we still continue to get things wrong, and we need to move beyond that. We need to actually become the advanced society that we like to believe that we are. We have all these flashy things, we have all the tech, we have all the AI, everything right. But yet we still kind of behave in quite these barbaric ways, where we just kind of stomp through places and not really take care or tread lightly, which as Indigenous people, we've really learned those lessons. And we learned it long, long, long, long ago.

And so I think it's really important and a really good timing that, as Mob, we're able to stand up with our back straight, be proud of this part of our culture, but then also say, "All right, we need to be involved in this. We need to be involved in the space industry, in astronomy, in these emerging fields."

Celeste Carnegie: I think we need to lead in it if we can get. It's the same in technology, and that's what I tell community all the time, this industry, they'll leave us behind. They will. Tech will leave us behind. They don't move the same way we do because that's such a fast-paced, rapidly moving space.

Karlie Noon: Yeah.

Celeste Carnegie: Because it's trying to keep up with the new wave. And yet the workplaces aren't. The tech's moving so fast, but the workplace just isn't. It's such a great opportunity for transformation, but people just aren't, it's just not, yeah. I think, because I work a lot around in diversity and inclusion and Indigenous engagement in the workplace as well, and it's just people, a lot of these companies are starting at such basic levels that for me, it's like, "Oh, that's where you are at." So then I have to meet people where they're at rather than being like, "I need you to get some critical thinking and critical awareness about sharing and get this moving, because I really want to get in there and have proper conversations."

And sometimes that's uncomfortable and it's not very comfortable for me either. You know what I mean? I don't like having these yarns either, but they have to be had because I think that's the only way growth can can occur, that's the only way growth can happen. And so sometimes that means that we're uncomfortable and sometimes that means that you might not like what comes out of my mouth, but join the club.

Karlie Noon: Yeah.

Celeste Carnegie: I think that a lot of it is around engagement and how we engage with each other, and also adding value. Adding value to each other, because most of the time, and communities are engaging outside of their communities with the assumption that they're not going to get anything in return. And so we just have to accept that fact and get it moving or else nothing really, we have to forge our own pathways, and sometimes that means just doing something that doesn't always serve us, which it's hard to watch sometimes. But that's why those of us who are in these spaces and are forging ahead and they're the first of their kind or are quite isolated and alone, it's like, "Well, you've got to be very brave." You've got to be so brave and so courageous, and it's tiring. It's really exhausting sometimes, but if I can make it the pathway for someone else a little bit easier, just that little bit, then yeah, I'm going to do it.

Karlie Noon: And I think that's what helps you get through it and helps you be brave.

Celeste Carnegie: Oh, totally. Totally.

Karlie Noon: When it's something so much bigger than you, because you can only stick up for yourself so many times, you can only advocate for yourself so many times, but when you're actually advocating for your community, you're advocating for. So I do a lot of work thinking about protection of Country. Sometimes this is Country on the ground, this is going against mining corporations sometimes. This is advocating for Sky Country and the preservation of Sky Country. If you can kind of frame it as, "Well, this has nothing to do with me. This is actually for my community and for my Country, and that includes all the people, all the babies, all the animals, everything, all the waterways, all the fish, everything." And you can acknowledge that, "Okay, I'm doing this for them and I just happen to be the tool that's here at the time," right? It's like, "Okay, I can do this, I can be brave for them."

Celeste Carnegie: Yes.

Karlie Noon: And I think that's why it's so important to find something, at least it was for me, to find something. I've been doing physics and astronomy for years now, and my day job is very much focused on doing western astronomy. I'm not researching Indigenous astronomy, I do western astronomy as my day job. And I could very easily not do any of that. I could very easily not have these conversations, not protest new minds on Country, not talk about Sky preservation. I could just as easily not do that and just be just a scientist.

But for me, that's the most important thing. It's what drives me. It's what keeps me going and what allows me to be brave. And just having that thing and that purpose that's so much bigger than you, I think it's just so important.

Celeste Carnegie: Because it's so interconnected.

Karlie Noon: Yeah

Celeste Carnegie: Interconnectedness.

Karlie Noon: Like the most used word in this book.

Celeste Carnegie: That's why I wanted to throw it out there. No, because everything has a place, everything and everyone has a place.

Karlie Noon: Yeah.

Celeste Carnegie: Yes. I like that one too because I believe that as well. And I think that's something we all learn.

Karlie Noon: I think so.

Celeste Carnegie: I really resonated with your book, Karlie.

Karlie Noon: Oh, good.

Celeste Carnegie: Your personal perspective. I felt seen.

Karlie Noon: Good.

Celeste Carnegie: Which is rare.

Karlie Noon: Yeah.

Celeste Carnegie: It's very rare. I'm just mindful of the fact we're at 6:45 now.

Karlie Noon: Beautiful.

Celeste Carnegie: We were going to open up for Q and A, if anyone had any questions.

Karlie Noon: So maybe just fling a hand. Oh yeah. Oh, no? We have a ...

Celeste Carnegie: Yeah. No, before we, I really just want to thank you because-

Karlie Noon: No, thank you.

Celeste Carnegie: It's rare. It is rare that black women in the space get to connect. And I never cry.

Karlie Noon: I should have told you not to cry. I thought it'd be mum, not you.

Celeste Carnegie: No, but it's inspiring. And I know that you say that you're just telling other people's stories in this book, but it means something to be trusted with these stories and to be told, because not everyone gets that. That's a privilege. And so that says something about you. So I just want to say thank you.

Karlie Noon: Thank you, Cece.

Celeste Carnegie: It's lovely to watch, truly. Watching your journey is really beautiful to watch.

Karlie Noon: Thank you.

Celeste Carnegie: So thank you.

Karlie Noon: Aww. I love you. You made me cry.

Celeste Carnegie: Okay, I'm sorry. I won't look at you anymore. Go on then, Jeremy.

Jeremy Ambrum: We're just going to walk to the mic so the people online can hear us. That's all.

Karlie Noon: Okay.

Jeremy Ambrum: Question guys.

Audience member 1: Thank you so much, that was amazing. I am really paranoid about space junk. I'm really worried about it. Does it affect Sky Country? Does it affect watching? Does it affect everything, the amount of stuff that's out there?

Karlie Noon: Yeah. Hugely so. So what we first found in about 2020, so Starlink first launched its initial constellation, they call them, mega constellation in 2018, the end of 2018. So by about 2020, in 2022-ish, they had about 4,000 satellites in the sky, and it had increased the sky glow, this thing called sky glow, which is kind of like, so when you look out at night, and Canberra is actually a really great place to look up, but when you look out, the sky just has a natural, sometimes natural, but sometimes unnatural glow to it, and essentially light pollution. And so that light pollution, that sky glow increased by about 10%.

And so there's a lot of studies coming out now, particularly from new observatories that are popping up around the world, trying to estimate how significant this sky glow is going to affect obviously astronomical observations, scientific observations, because we're measuring light, hundreds of millions, billions of kilometres away, very, very faint light.

In my case, I measure radio waves. They're also very faint. And these satellites scatter a lot of radio waves and light coming from the sun. And that's why we're getting this overwhelmingly increase in the sky glow. So obviously this affects astronomers, but this affects people.

So with a lot of knowledge, cultural knowledge that relates to the sky foreign oral culture, that knowledge has to be placed somewhere. This is what songlines are, it's knowledge that has been put in a place. And so Sky Knowledge, that also has a place. So the Milky Way, for example, there's a lot of traditions that relate to the Milky Way, a lot of traditions that relate to Pleiades or the Seven Sisters. So that's where the knowledge is stored and it's used as what they call a mnemonic. It's essentially a tool that helps us retrieve that information. And so if you lose access to these places, these sites, you're essentially are erasing that knowledge or erasing our way to access that as an oral tradition or our oral culture. But of course, it's affecting everything here. The migratory species, birds, magpies, their breeding season is all dependent on the light. And those natural cycles. Turtles use the light on the horizon. Any migratory species is affected by this.

And so we're currently at about 10,000 satellites that are up in the near Earth orbit at the moment. This has hugely been funded by the military, which is something that people aren't aware of, which is really, really terrible. This is all of our sky. We all have rights and ownership of the sky. And so Starlink, for example, they want to have about 40,000 satellites up in the sky in 10 years or so, but there's other companies, Amazon have their own version, a British company, OneWeb, have their own version. And so it's just, when I say we're kind of going in this trajectory that is very reminiscent of say colonialism, that's kind of what I mean. We're not treading lightly. We're doing the opposite. We're just taking up this space without any considerations of the consequences. And we know these consequences now. They could kind of play ignorant when they first put them up there, but we know very well what these consequences are now, but they continue to do them. And so yeah, it's very scary. It's very alarming. This is why things like dark sky preservation is really important.

So I'm currently involved in trying to get a new dark sky place recognised on my home country, Gamilaraay country. So that's a work in progress. It's going really well, the council's really supportive of it. But when we think about national parks, for example, this is essentially what's been done with national parks when colonialism came into Australia and then we started building national parks and separating zones, like this is a natural zone. We'll keep this, we won't develop this.

When we look at our national parks today, so I went out to Tidbinbilla a couple of years ago, and I was just so heartsick looking at the conditions and seeing how low the water was there and how dry it was there. It doesn't matter if we make these little zones because we can't protect it from things that are global, like climate change, or in this situation, something global like these mega constellations. So we'll try and build these zones and we'll try and do what we can, but really we need to say no. And that involves our country, because our country has also given permission for Starlink to go ahead, and similar companies. So yeah, we really need to be political. We have no choice. Yeah. Thank you.

Audience member 2: Great to hear you ladies. Thank you very much. It's inspirational. I just wanted to just reinforce what you said, there are actually lawyers for space now, and that's how much space is developed that should exist.

But I just think what, it is colonialism, we're just trying to take something else off you. And I think we possibly do that through pollution as well, because in my readings of, say looking at a crescent moon and the tips of the crescent moon, and how that might relate to what winds are blowing, what the next season might bring, pollution is going to affect that as well. And so we'll be driving people out further and further to find those clear skies.

Karlie Noon: Yeah.

Audience member 2: But I'm just wondering, you now do radio astronomy, so you're looking at things that are light years away. I just wonder, can you comment on, I just find that the Indigenous observation is probably more relevant and tied to how you were going to live and the oneness with the land, because that was important to you to be able to maybe forecast what was coming and know. And I think that's possibly something that's lost in the western astronomy that goes looking galaxies unconscionable distances away.

Karlie Noon: Yeah.

Audience member 2: And that is the question that the Aboriginal astronomy, Indigenous astronomy is far more relevant just to getting through life.

Karlie Noon: Yeah, I'd completely agree. And when we consider Indigenous knowledge, and I tried to really have this a feature off the book, that Indigenous knowledge is not. We don't have astronomy over here and maths over there, and earth science over there, and social studies over there. It's all one. You have a story that happens to have astronomical knowledge in it, but it relates to the birds, it relates to the winds, as you mentioned, it relates to what the moon's doing. It relates to all of these different things because that's the reality of the world that we live in. So it's much more practical knowledge.

And I completely agree, academia and western science is quite abstract. It doesn't, at first glance, really appear to have much practical use. There are some quite notable examples where we have gained quite significant, for example, technological advances because of the study of astronomy. So for example, the invention of Wi-Fi was an Australian invention. This is a very well known one, and it came out of studying black holes and needing to send large volumes of information to collaborators, and so they invented Wi-Fi.

So there are examples where obviously western science has been hugely beneficial. But I think where I sit is they're both really clever. They both teach us so much and sometimes the same things, but also sometimes quite different things. And Indigenous knowledge is able to be this beautiful holistic knowing that connects all these different things. Whereas, in contrast, western science can really go into the detail. Why are we not working together? Why are we not learning from each other and growing with each other, and actually becoming that advanced society and implementing all that we've learned as humans that share this world? That's what I hope and dream and wish for.

Staff member: Karlie, if we have time, I do have a number of questions that have come through from people watching online.

Karlie Noon: Oh, lovely.

Staff member: So we've probably got time for one. Someone has asked if you could share a bit about what your PhD work is focused on.

Karlie Noon: Oh, sure. So I look at the Milky Way. I feel really lucky that I get to look at the Milky Way. As much as I celebrate and really try to pedestal Indigenous knowledge, I equally love the other stuff I get to do as well, and the really technical stuff I get to do. And I do feel really privileged that I get to study astronomy. It is a privilege. Not many people in the world get to do it, and I feel really, really lucky that I do get to do that. And I get to look at our galaxy every day. How lucky is that?

I didn't go too far into the universe. I stayed really close to our beautiful galaxy. And I look at the centre of our galaxy. So we have the supermassive black hole that's in the centre. Around that supermassive black hole, we have a lot of stars. There's a lot of stars. And you can see it. You can literally look up and see all these stars that bend the emu in the sky, or that big band of light that we see across our beautiful southern skies.

We're looking towards the centre of the galaxy there, and that's why we see so many stars. All these stars have kind of gravitated towards that central bit. And over millions and millions of years, these stars have gone supernova. So lots and lots of supernova going off all the time. And when that happens over millions of years, the supernova, it's like this big explosion. And because we're rotating in this direction, the supernova goes off pretty much in that direction. The wind doesn't go very far in the disc, so it goes above and below the disc. And when that happens again and again and again over millions, hundreds of millions of years, what we see now are these huge winds that have been pushed up by all of these supernova. And it's an extremely hot wind. It ranges, there's lots of different phases in this wind, but it goes up to about 10 million Kelvin, which is basically Celsius. So 10 million degrees. It's very, very hot.

And what I do is, I mentioned radio astronomy. Now, radio telescopes, they observe radio waves, which correspond to a very particular element on the periodic table. It's the very first one, it's called hydrogen, and it's pretty much the base element of everything we know. It is the base element. It's the most simple form, most simple element that we have in our universe. And so this is the building block of everything we see. And we're just lucky, and there were some very clever people who figured out radio astronomy, some very clever Australians who figured out radioastronomy in the World War II era, who worked for CSIRO. And they found that if you point a radio telescope up in the sky, you can see these signals coming from this element, this neutral hydrogen in the universe or in the galaxy.

And so I'm looking at this neutral hydrogen, and we know that neutral hydrogen exists in a very cold form. So neutral hydrogen is about a hundred degrees. And so what I do is I look towards the centre of the Galaxy and I see these really cold pockets of hydrogen in the centre of the Galaxy, in this 10 million degrees wind. And so my job is finding out or trying to find out how these really cold gas clouds can exist in such an extremely hot environment.

And to do that, I use the observations, I had to learn a lot of chemistry, which was shocking to me as a physicist. And I use computer simulations to do this because, of course, as astronomers, we can't don't have a laboratory. We can't just go and run experiments, but we can on supercomputers.

So we use supercomputers to do this, to simulate the galaxy, to simulate the wind and the cold pockets, to really try and hone in on the physics there of what's happening. Because I think we kind of have this idea that we know everything and all the physics is sorted out, and we're all good. But we're really not. There's so much we don't understand. And so that's what I'm trying to understand and add some knowledge, and yeah, insight into. Thanks.

Celeste Carnegie: You're so knowledgeable. I want to learn things now.

Jeremy Ambrum: Thank you very much, Karlie Noon and Celeste Carnegie for a very, there's a lot of words in these conversations that I don't understand, but I'm glad we recorded it so I can go research it later. But thank you for these really, really wonderful and deep conversations and your journey, sharing your time with us. We really appreciate you visiting the National Library. Can we get a round of applause for our guests?

Karlie's going to sign some books. It's going to be a moment to be up there, but in the meantime, you can grab a book from the Bookshop upstairs. To everyone else going home, safe travels home and thank you for joining us tonight.

Karlie Noon: Thank you.

Celeste Carnegie: Thank you.