South Star | The Missing Pole Star of the Southern Sky

Tonight we're looking at the skies of the southern hemisphere.

And I'm going to tell you a story that is so remarkable, it proves this tale is not just a myth…but a memory.

The focus of tonight’s story is in the southern sky, where the stars wheel around an empty point. But it wasn't always empty. It's a tale about a great south star that once ruled over the southern sky. A southern pole star. And what happened when it lost its place in the sky.

This tale comes from the Palawa people, aboriginals from the island of Tasmania, which is just south of mainland Australia.

The Palawa people paid an unimaginable price for contact with the British, and that history matters when we share their stories.

So let's go back. To the very beginning. When the world was young and the ice was thick and a powerful being made something so terrible and broken that his own brother had to do intervene. And that intervention would leave one of them dead.