HERMES is a multi-fibre spectrograph being built for the AAT 3.9m telescope, designed to simultaneously obtain high resolution (R ˜ 28000) spectra for ˜ 400 stars over a 2° field of view. The Galactic Archaeology with HERMES (GALAH) Survey is a major Australian-led project to obtain detailed elemental abundances for a million stars, with the goal of using chemical tagging to decipher the formation history of the Milky Way.

The primary driver for the HERMES multi-object high resolution spectrometer on the AAT is a Galactic archaeology survey of about a million stars with V < 14. I will give a brief overview of the instrument, Galactic archaeology and chemical tagging, and then describe the goals and plans for the GALAH survey.

This review discusses the structure and evolution of the Milky Way, in the context of opportunities provided by asteroseismology of red giants. The review is structured according to the main Galactic components: the thin disk, thick disk, stellar halo, and the Galactic bar/bulge. The review concludes with an overview of Galactic archaeology and chemical tagging, and a brief account of the upcoming HERMES survey with the AAT.

Stellar populations in galaxies are vast repositories of fossil information. In recent years it has become possible to consider high resolution spectroscopic surveys of millions of stars. New high resolution multi-object spectrographs on 4-8m class telescopes (HERMES, WFMOS) will allow us for the first time to make large and detailed chemical abundance surveys of stars in the Galactic disk, bulge and halo, and apply the techniques of chemical tagging to recovering the fossil information left over from galaxy assembly.