ukSRC Webinar Series: Sharing the Sky and Stars: building authentic partnership with local and Indigenous communities’partnership with local and Indigenous communities

Building a 50-year observatory across two continents — in places that never asked for a telescope — demands a different kind of engagement. In this webinar we share what SKAO has learned about working with the local and Indigenous communities at both our sites: the Karoo in South Africa, and Wajarri Yamaji Country in Western Australia. Neither had a built-in audience of science supporters or an engagement baseline to build from — so engagement and the science have had to grow together.

We will look at how this partnership shapes the project and the Observatory, not the other way round: from contractor obligations on local and Indigenous hiring and upskilling, to SARAO’s long-running Human Capital Development programme, among many examples. Going beyond compliance, we argue, is not a bonus — it’s what makes a generational facility durable.

In Australia, the Wajarri Yamaji People gifted a Wajarri language name for the observatory site where the SKA-Low telescope is being built, Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, the CSIRO Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory. Inyarrimanha ilgari bundara means ‘Sharing the Sky and Stars’, and the Cosmic Echoes exhibition is one of the ways we live up to that. The second half of the webinar focuses on this art exhibition, which brings together Indigenous and local artists from around both sites to share their own stories of the sky, the land and the cosmos — and explores why art, alongside science, is one of the most powerful tools for two-way engagement, giving communities agency over how their knowledge and culture are represented on the national and global stages

Tuesday 7th July 2026, 11:00-12:00 BST. Please register to receive details of how to join the webinar via Zoom