SAMOA – Damian McGrath admits it will be an odd feeling coaching against Samoa on the upcoming World Sevens Series.

The Englishman has been appointed head coach of the Canada men’s sevens team, a month after being sacked by the Samoa Rugby Union.

He led Samoa to a ninth place finish during the World Series but they failed to qualify for the Rio Olympics.

McGrath said the past month has been a rollercoaster of emotions.

“From the shock of the dismissal and the upheaval and the legal issues that transpired in between and it’s been a great weight off my shoulders to get the Canada job and I’m really looking forward to that.

“I was so delighted and excited to get the Canada job because it’s a big project with a lot of work to do with enormous potential and that’s something that really appeals to me.”

Canada finished 13th on the last World Sevens Series, four places below Samoa and Damian McGrath said his first task will be to rebuild a new-look team.

And while excited about his next challenge and the impending start of the new World Series campaign in less than two months, McGrath said it was not easy to leave Samoa behind.

It’s been embarrassing to a degree that people have said so many nice things and been so positive about my short tenure in the job,” he said.

“I love Samoa and I love the Samoan people and it’s going to be very hard to leave because we’ve made some great friends here and just loved living the life here and I’d desperately love Samoa to be successful.

“So, whilst I’m looking forward to going to Canada, it’s going to be very hard for my wife and I to pack up and leave what’s been a fantastic experience.”

“I’ve loved the players and working with them so much and I wish them all the success in the world because I know how much they sacrificed to be part of the team and very little they’ve got in way of resources and the poor pay they’re receiving.”

“In comparison to the rest of the world they really do punch above their weight and I’d like nothing more than to see those young men be successful.

“It’s going to be hard to work on the other side of the fence to them – but that’s professional sport.” - Samoa Observer Aboriginal observatory discovered

AUSTRALIA – An ancient Aboriginal site at a secret location in the Victorian bush could be the oldest astronomical observatory in the world, pre-dating Stonehenge and even the Great Pyramids of Giza.

Scientists studying the Wurdi Yuang stone arrangement say it could date back more than 11,000 years and provide clues into the origins of agriculture.

Dr Duane Hamacher is a leader in the study of Indigenous astronomy and has been working with Aboriginal elders at the site to reconstruct their knowledge of the stars and planets.

“Some academics have referred to this stone arrangement here as Australia’s version of Stonehenge,” he said.

“I think the question we might have to ask is – is Stonehenge Britain’s version of Wurdi Yuang? Because this could be much, much older.”

If the site is more than 7000-years old, it will rewrite history and further disprove the notion that first Australians were uniformly nomadic, hunter-gatherers.

Scientists believe the arrangement of stones was able to map out the movements of the sun throughout the year.

Custodian Reg Abrahams said the region around the observatory seemed to have once had semi-permanent villages with evidence of early fishing and farming practices.

“If you’re going to have a stone arrangement where you mark off the seasons throughout the year with the solstices and equinoxes, it kind of makes sense if you’re at least most of the year in one specific location to do that,” he said. “So if that’s the case, it would make sense if you’re near permanent food and water sources.”

He said there were areas where eel traps would have been set up and even signs of “gilgies”, or terraces used in farming.

“You see a lot of agricultural and aquacultural practices, so evidence of this agriculture may go back tens of thousands of years, pre-dating what anthropologists commonly think of as the dawn of agriculture which is about 6000 years ago in Mesopotamia,” he said.

Dr Hamacher said early first Australians had complex knowledge systems.

“They understand very well the motions of the sun, the moon, the planets and the stars throughout the year and over longer periods of time,” he said.

“White Australians don’t generally recognise that the history of colonialism has erased that, so what we’re doing is helping the communities piece that information back together by working with communities.”

Traditional owners like Judy Dalton-Walsh say research into the site and Aboriginal astronomy means that the knowledge can continue to be passed on.

“We learnt at school the European names for the stars and the Milky Way and it’s also good to know that we traditionally had a name for them as well. Our gods were up there in the stars,” she said. - ABC