The Americans had Apollo. The Soviets had Soyuz. The Chinese have Tiangong. And Australia? We now have the world’s first taxpayer-funded attempt to guide space exploration using songlines. It’s as if the nation looked up at the stars, ignored four centuries of physics, and concluded that what satellite design really needs is a smoking ceremony and a cultural consultation workshop.
According to the project brief, “learning from songlines, creation stories and deep cultural connections between people and Sky Country” will help develop “intercultural guidelines” for space policy, public education and industry practice.
You couldn’t make this stuff up.
The $528,491 price tag was paid by the Australian Research Council — a billion-dollar institution supposedly charged with strengthening Australia’s economic, scientific and technological capability. Instead, it increasingly resembles a culture-captured guidance counsellor funding projects that belong on Mars rather than in a country trying to compete with nations that actually build rockets.
When a body entrusted with over $1 billion a year starts tipping money into academic mood-lighting and cosmological storytelling, you have to wonder whether anyone inside remembers its purpose. The ARC’s job is to fund excellence, not hallucinate it. Yet here we are, watching a cornerstone of the research system drift so far from community expectations you’d be forgiven for thinking its selection panels were convening from the International Space Station.
Galileo must be rolling in his grave. Nearly four centuries after being placed under house arrest for daring to suggest the Earth orbits the Sun, modern academia seems determined to drag science back into the comforting dimness of mythology.
It’s worth remembering what actually built the modern world. Since Bologna in 1088 and Oxford shortly after, universities forged humanity’s most powerful tool: the scientific method. Aristotle carved logic out of chaos. Bacon gave us empiricism. Copernicus rewrote the heavens. Newton forged mechanics and calculus. Lyell uncovered the long history beneath our feet. Darwin explained the diversity of life. Maxwell united electricity and magnetism. Mendel cracked inheritance. These were not cultural narratives or “ways of knowing.” They were disciplined assaults on ignorance — industrial-strength intellect grinding superstition into dust.
Now imagine telling these great men of science that in 2025 the cutting edge of academic thought is bolting folklore onto astrophysics. Newton would drop his apple. Darwin would wonder how a supposedly advanced civilization managed to evolve backwards. Hutton and Lyell — who revealed the immensity of deep time — would stare in disbelief as universities collapse back into the intellectual Stone Age. And Einstein, who proved spacetime bends under mass, would shake his head at institutions now bending reality itself to flatter fashionable cultural narratives.
Let’s be clear: this is not an attack on Indigenous people. Traditional knowledge evolved for traditional conditions. Hunter-gatherer societies developed remarkable observational skills — tracking game, reading seasons, navigating between water holes, using fire to open up the landscape. Important, meaningful, impressive. But these long-held, mostly fragmented systems are not substitutes for astrophysics, hydrology, engineering, genomics or quantum modelling. If Dreamtime cosmology held the key to Martian colonization, Elon Musk would have a panel of Elders on Space X’s payroll.
Indigenous knowledge mattered in its context. It still matters in a few niche areas. But on the whole, modern botany, biology, meteorology, geology, agronomy, physics — every discipline — has outstripped those knowledge bases by centuries. Confusing cultural knowledge with scientific knowledge is like confusing a campfire with a fusion reactor. Warm, meaningful, important — but fundamentally different.
The real culprit here is modern academia, which now treats all “knowledge systems” as equal. They are not. Knowledge that is testable, repeatable, measurable and falsifiable is superior to knowledge that is not. That’s what separates the modern world from the Dark Ages, and the Dark Ages from the Stone Age. The moment we pretend otherwise, we’re not being kind or inclusive — we’re being dishonest or worse we are setting indigenous knowledge up for ridicule.
But academia today is allergic to honesty. It worships cultural relativism. It insists disciplines “decolonise” themselves — even when the discipline is astrophysics.
And it doesn’t stop at space. This intellectual decay has marched quietly but relentlessly through every part of natural-resource policy.
Fire now suffers the same fate. Governments are pouring money into Cultural Burning Programs and Natural Heritage Trust projects like the Right-Way Desert Fire Project, on the romantic assumption that inherited patch-burning rituals somehow outperform supercomputer-driven fuel-load models. Cultural burning belonged to a continent without feral grasses, fences, roads, livestock or power lines. Today’s fire behaviour is meteorology, engineering and physics — not oral lore from a millennia-old landscape.
Water policy has followed. State departments now invite spiritual interpretation into hydrological planning. We are funding “cultural water practitioners” to advise on river flows that determine irrigation flows that farmers rely on for their livelihoods. It is one thing to respect cultural heritage; it is quite another to override hydrological models with beliefs from cultures that had no words for irrigation, aquifers or climate oscillations.
Drought policy has taken the same turn. The Future Drought Fund now bankrolls schemes like Strengthening Drought Resilience on Country, which imagine Indigenous cultural knowledge as the key to managing multi-year dry cycles. Real drought planning is ENSO analysis, evapotranspiration modelling, soil-moisture metrics and feed budgeting — not folklore. Farmers survive drought by hedging risk and planning ahead, not by consulting cosmology.
Fisheries have not escaped either. The FRDC’s Indigenous Fishing Subprogram now encourages the integration of Sea Country stories into stock assessment. Stock assessment is statistics — recruitment curves, biomass modelling, CPUE, growth rates. Yet governments that claims to follow “the best available science” now flirts with maritime mysticism. Mind you judging by the recent decisions on the West Coast demersal fishery, the Minister might as well have taken all her advice from cultural knowledge holders as she seemed to ignore all the advice of the researchers.
Across all these domains, the pattern is identical: hard sciences built through centuries of testing, measurement and refinement are being remodelled into cultural experience programs. Fire becomes ceremony. Water becomes belief. Drought becomes storytelling. Space becomes cultural astrology. Fisheries become oceanic clairvoyance.
This might be harmless if confined to university corners already divorced from reality. But when it becomes embedded in policies, strategies, frameworks and governance models, it has real consequences. It distorts science. It misallocates funding. It replaces evidence with emotion and engineering with ethnography. It is the slow, quiet reversal of the Enlightenment.
And the most galling part? Almost no one will say so. It takes no courage to nod along with the elites, to parrot the approved lines, to genuflect before the bureaucratic jargon of “two-way learning,” “cultural safety,” “knowledge sharing” and “on-Country outcomes.” Departments like DPIRD are some of the worst offenders, it seems every major projects now have to include Indigenous “ways of knowing” over water, drought and land-management policy — even when it adds nothing of scientific value.
We are not strengthening science by diluting it. We are not improving space, water, drought, fish or fire policy by replacing experts with storytellers. We are simply surrendering intellectual integrity — yet another extension of the compulsory Welcome-to-Country theatre, another triumph of symbolism over substance, another moment where the elites pretend Indigenous lore belongs in the laboratories of a modern nation. It doesn’t, and deep down they know it.
It’s time to stop pretending all knowledge is equal. And time for all of us to laugh this nonsense out of the room and call out the Australian Research Council when they waste taxpayers’ dollars on projects that totally fail the pub test.
