Stories in the Stars
A Boorong Sky Game · Shared Sky Hackathon 2026
Inspiration
Every event in Australia begins the same way. Someone reads an Acknowledgement of Country. Sometimes the words land — you feel something shift. Then the applause comes, everyone sits down, and the meeting continues.
We kept thinking about what happens next. The person who opens a search bar afterward. The urban Aboriginal young person wondering what their sky looks like. They find academic papers, museum PDFs, a planetarium show that requires a trip to Melbourne. All good. None of them built for that moment.
The Boorong astronomical knowledge system is one of the most documented Indigenous astronomy traditions in Australia — and one of the least accessible. It has guided people for over 60,000 years. It lives in an 1857 pastoralist's notes and a university thesis.
We wanted to build an entrance. Not more words. An encounter that actually happens to you.
What It Does
Stories in the Stars is a three-night interactive journey through the Boorong people's night sky — a sky that contains not just stars, but seasons, family law, and survival knowledge spanning more than $6 \times 10^4$ years.
Night One — Find Your Direction. Players search for Bunya (the Southern Cross) across a silent, unlabelled sky. 36 interactive stars, 6 form the constellation. Grandma guides through error: "the important ones are quiet."
Night Two — See the Darkness. Tchingal, the Emu in the Sky, is not made of stars — it is made of the dark clouds between them. Players trace the emu's body across the Milky Way by dragging through darkness.
Night Three — Read the Calendar. Six rounds of seasonal matching. Players connect what the sky is doing to what is happening on the ground:
| Sky event | Ground event |
|---|---|
| Bunya stands upright | Possums are having young — make cloaks |
| Tchingal runs | Emu eggs are ready to gather |
| Neilloan rises at dusk | Malleefowl begin building mounds |
| Marpeankurrk appears north | Wood ant larvae ready under the logs |
| Djuit rises at sunset | Coldest time — move to high ground |
After three nights, everything assembles into a seasonal story map — a rotating wheel of six constellations, each pointing to the earth below it.
How We Built It
Stack: React 18 + Vite 5. No external UI libraries or animation frameworks.
- All star fields and the Story Map wheel → Canvas 2D API
- Silhouette cards in Night Three → SVG
- "Save your map" export → Canvas PNG
We worked entirely within publicly available, community-authorised materials: the Scienceworks / North-West Nations Aboriginal Corporation collaboration, Morieson (2003), and Hamacher's published research. Every Boorong name, every seasonal connection, every story comes directly from those sources. Nothing was invented or extrapolated.
Challenges
Getting the knowledge right without getting it wrong. We did not speak directly with Boorong community members during this hackathon. That meant working carefully within the boundaries of what is publicly authorised — and being honest about where those boundaries are.
Making darkness interactive. Night Two required players to trace something that isn't there — dark clouds, not stars. Building an intuitive drag mechanic for negative space took more iteration than anything else in the build.
Visual language without cultural appropriation. Aboriginal dot art is a culturally specific knowledge system, not an aesthetic. We built our visual language from the landscape of Lake Tyrrell itself — stars, silhouettes, water reflections. Grandma remains a silhouette because we don't have community authorisation to define what she looks like.
Accomplishments
The gap we found was real: nothing interactive, nothing narrative-driven, nothing anyone anywhere can open in a browser and step inside. We built that thing.
We're proud that every design decision has a reason that holds up. The silhouette characters. The absence of dot-painting. The attribution footer on every screen — not as a disclaimer, but as a statement of respect.
And we're proud of the seasonal wheel. Six constellations and six ground events assembling into one rotating system. That's the Boorong knowledge working as it was meant to — not fragmented into facts, but held together as a living calendar.
What We Learned
That the Acknowledgement of Country is not the beginning of a conversation — it's usually the end of one. And that the gap between hearing something and understanding it is exactly where a game can live.
Constraint is generative. Not having direct community access forced us to be more rigorous about sourcing, more careful about what we claimed, and more honest about what the project is: an entrance, not an authority.
What's Next for One STAR After Another
The essential next step is bringing this back to community — to Boorong descendants, Wergaia language community members, and North-West Nations Aboriginal Corporation — and letting them determine what it should become, what should change, and whether it should exist in its current form at all.
Beyond that:
- Expand to other documented Indigenous astronomy traditions across Australia
- Build accessibility into the core — audio-first navigation for low-vision players
- Find institutional partners (AIATSIS, Scienceworks, state education departments) to carry it from prototype to something that reaches the person opening the search bar after the Acknowledgement ends
We built an entrance. The door belongs to them.
Cultural rights to the Boorong astronomical traditions belong to the North-West Nations Aboriginal Corporation. Game content is based on Scienceworks' Stories in the Stars, Morieson (2003), and Hamacher's published research.
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