Carlleen Dingo's earliest memories involve staring at the inky black skies above Geraldton, or Jambinu, a coastal town 400 kilometres north of Perth known for wildflowers, red earth, fierce winds, and undulating sandy dunes. At night, however, there's another world on display - one the Yamaji-Wajarri people have consulted as a teacher and guide for thousands of years.

"At night-time, living out in the bush, [I] always sat around the fire and looked up," Dingo recalls. "You get curious and you watch, and then you watch them move." Her grandmothers told stories of ancestors traveling and hunting by reading the skies, and her pops would point out the Milky Way as a celestial roadmap.

That ancient relationship is the subject of a global exhibition, "Cosmic Echoes: A shared sky," which has toured Africa and Europe before returning to Australia. Dingo is one of the artists involved, and her paintings journeyed from Geraldton across the Indian Ocean to Africa, then to Manchester and Luxembourg. "I was like: 'Well, all right then!" she says.

About 300 kilometres inland, the Murchison region hosts the Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara radio-astronomy observatory on Wajarri country - home to the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) observatory's SKA-Low telescope. This array of 131,072 two-metre-tall antennas (resembling metal Christmas trees) spread across 74 kilometres maps distant galaxies, cosmic magnetic fields, and black holes. Dr Douglas Bock of CSIRO notes the observatory resulted from a decades-long relationship with the Wajarri Yamaji Aboriginal Corporation.

Prof Jessica Dempsey, director-general of the SKA observatory, calls the exhibition an artistic exploration spanning two continents. "We can only learn more by sharing stories and ways of looking across communities," she says. The SKA is also building a mid-frequency telescope in South Africa's Karoo region - the SKA-Mid telescope, with 196 dish antennas each standing nearly 15 metres tall.

For South African artist Junior Oliphant, a First Nations person from a coloured town still grappling with apartheid's legacy, identity is complex. His painting depicts Dr Katrina Esau (Ouma Katrina), the last living N|uu speaker in the world - "the last living link between a lost culture and a lost language." Oliphant notes that in Khoisan folklore, the Milky Way was created when a girl kept in a cage cried until the cage exploded and ashes flew into the sky. "With the Wajarri people, there are similarities in what they see in the stars. Even though we are worlds apart, I feel like two different Aboriginal groups are connected under one star light," he says.

Dempsey points out that Western technology took centuries to catch up to Indigenous astronomical knowledge, citing the Seven Sisters (Pleiades star cluster) as a family in many cultures' stories - confirmed by Western science only thousands of years later. For Dingo, there's deep pride in her people being recognized as hosts of world-class science: "We've got the biggest satellites sitting out on country. That's something to be proud of, because you always want to be the biggest and the best."