The Yolngu

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On a sheet of stringybark, in the language of paint that the senior men of Yirrkala reserved for the most serious matters, two clans set down the designs of their Country and pasted beside them a few lines of typed English. The bark was carried south, in August 1963, to the floor of the Australian House of Representatives. To the parliament it looked like a curiosity tabled among the day’s papers. To the men who painted it, it was the thing itself: the Law of the land, drawn in the only script in which such a claim could properly be made.

The people who made that document are the Yolngu, of north-eastern Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory. The word yolngu means, simply, “person.” It names not a single tribe but an aggregation of clans bound by a shared body of Law, a family of related languages, and one overarching division that runs through everything they know. They are one nation among the many of the Aboriginal Australians, and their Country is the tropical coast and its hinterland at the top of the continent, a land of monsoon forest, paperbark swamp, and long beaches facing the Arafura Sea. They have held it, by their own reckoning and by the documentary record of deep Aboriginal antiquity, since the ancestral beings shaped it in the creation.

Rock formations and open country in Arnhem Land, the homeland of the Yolngu. Photograph by Romy Martini, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The two halves of the world

The deepest grammar of the Yolngu world is the moiety. Every Yolngu clan belongs to one of two great divisions, Dhuwa or Yirritja, and a person takes the moiety of their father. This much a kinship chart could record. What the chart cannot convey is the reach of the division. The two moieties between them do not merely sort people into marriageable halves; they divide the whole of creation. Every animal and plant, every tract of land and stretch of fresh and salt water, every wind and rock and ancestral being, falls to one side or the other. The shark, the stringybark, a particular reach of river, the morning star: each is Dhuwa or Yirritja. A man and a woman of the same moiety may not marry; the two halves must wed across the line, so that the structure of the cosmos is reproduced in the structure of every family. The moiety is not a belief laid over the world. It is the order of the world, and to know a thing’s moiety is to know what it is.

Within each moiety the clan, the bäpurru, is the holding unit of Law and land. Prominent among the Dhuwa clans are the Rirratjingu and the Gälpu; the Gumatj are a leading Yirritja clan. Each clan owns a tract of Country, and with it owns the songs that map that Country, the designs that depict it, the ceremonies that renew it, and the names that the ancestors gave it. These are not separate possessions. They are facets of a single inheritance, and a clan is, in the most exact sense, the people to whom a particular stretch of the creation was given to hold.

That inheritance reaches back to a defined moment and a defined journey. For the Dhuwa moiety, the world begins at Yalangbara, on the coast, with the arrival of the Djang’kawu. They came by canoe out of the east, from the island of Baralku across the water, traveling at night under the light of the Morning Star. Two sisters and their brother made the landing; from the sand dunes at Yalangbara the elder sister gave birth to the first of the Dhuwa clans, the Rirratjingu, and as the party traveled westward across north-eastern Arnhem Land she bore the others in turn. They sang and named the plants and animals as they went; they plunged their digging sticks into the ground and freshwater wells sprang up; their sacred objects became the landforms still standing along the route. To each clan the Djang’kawu gave its name and its language, its Country and its share of the Law. This is the foundation story of half the Yolngu world, and within that world it is not an account of the long ago. It is the description of how the present order came to be and continues to hold.

The Law and the ways it is carried

The Yolngu name for their ancestral Law is rom, and the larger body of sacred Law, ceremony, and the restricted knowledge bound up with them is madayin (also written maḏayin). It governs marriage and kinship, the resolution of disputes, the management of land and its resources, and the relations between the living and the ancestral beings who remain present in the Country they made. It was not legislated and is not written. It was laid down in the creation by beings such as the Djang’kawu, and it is held and transmitted through performance: through song, through design, through ceremony. The Yolngu leader Galarrwuy Yunupingu has described the Law as something living and constant — “my backbone,” in his phrase — rather than a rule imposed from outside.

Three vehicles carry the Law, and they are inseparable. The first is manikay, the public song-cycles, sung to the accompaniment of the yidaki (the long wooden drone instrument widely known as the didgeridoo) and the bilma clapsticks. A manikay series follows an ancestral being across a stretch of Country, naming the places, the waters, and the creatures along the way, so that to sing the cycle is to travel and to hold the land in voice. The second is buŋgul, the ceremonial dance that enacts the same journeys. The third is miny’tji, the sacred clan designs.

The miny’tji are the most concentrated form the Law takes. Each clan owns a distinctive set of designs — among the Rirratjingu, characteristic linear patterns — that depict the ancestral events and the Country tied to them. Painted in earth pigments on bodies during ceremony, on sacred objects, and on sheets of stringybark, they are at once the clan’s art, its scripture, and its proof of title. The anthropologist Howard Morphy has likened the ownership of song, painting, and ceremony to a set of title-deeds proving ownership of land; the designs, in his account, function as deeds to Country. To hold the right to paint a particular miny’tji is to hold the lawful connection to the place it depicts. The design is not a picture of the title. The design is the title. This single principle — that to paint the design of a Country is to assert one’s standing in its Law — is the hinge on which the modern history of the Yolngu turns.

A bark painting in earth pigment from the Arnhem Land region, c. 1900. Across Arnhem Land, sacred designs painted on bark and body are at once art, scripture, and proof of lawful connection to Country. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Some of the Yolngu narratives are public, told and sung openly. Others belong to the deepest layer of madayin and are restricted — held by particular people, men’s or women’s business, not to be disclosed to outsiders. The journey of the Wagilag sisters (also written Wawilak) is among the most sacred of all, bound up with ceremony and with the great ancestral python; its public outline is known, but its inner content is closed knowledge, and it is treated here only at the level the tradition itself makes public. Across Aboriginal Australia such powerful ancestral serpents recur — the great water-snake whose forms gather under the umbrella name Rainbow Serpent — though each people holds its own being under its own Law, and the Yolngu python is not to be collapsed into any other. The distinction between open and restricted knowledge is itself part of the Law. To say less than everything is not an omission. It is the correct observance.

Strangers from the sea

The Yolngu coast was not sealed off before the British. For something close to two centuries — by the common reckoning from at least the early 1700s until 1907, though some accounts and oral traditions push the contact considerably earlier — fleets of praus sailed each year on the monsoon winds from Makassar, on the island of Sulawesi, to the Arnhem Land shore, which the visitors called Marege. They came for trepang, the sea cucumber prized in the markets of southern China, gathering and curing it along the coast in season and sailing home when the winds turned. The Macassans and the Yolngu traded: fishing access in exchange for cloth, tobacco, rice, iron, and dugout-canoe technology. The encounter left a permanent mark on the language and the imagination of the coast. Yolngu speech absorbed Macassan words — rupiah for money, balanda for a white person (from “Hollander”), and others — and the comings and goings of the trepang fleets entered Yolngu song and ceremony. When the British arrived, the Yolngu were a people already practiced in dealing with seaborne strangers on their own terms.

The bark petitions and the long argument over land

The British settlement reached north-eastern Arnhem Land late. In 1935 a Methodist mission was established at Yirrkala, and the colonial order — its church, its store, its expectations — settled onto a society that had held its Country continuously since the creation. The collision that defined the Yolngu in the wider Australian story came in 1963.

On 13 March 1963 the Commonwealth government excised more than 300 square kilometers from the Arnhem Land Aboriginal reserve, to be opened for bauxite mining on the Gove Peninsula. The traditional owners — the Gumatj and Rirratjingu clans — had not been consulted. The land in question was theirs under rom, held through the designs and the songs, and the excision was, in their understanding, a seizure of Country that no government had any standing to give away.

The Yolngu answered in the script of the Law. The federal politician Kim Beazley, visiting the newly built church at Yirrkala and struck by the painted panels the senior clan artists had made for it, suggested that a petition to parliament might be cast as a painting on bark. The Yolngu took the idea and made it their own. They prepared documents in which a typed text — set out in both Yolngu Matha and English, asking the parliament to recognize their rights and to hear them before their land was taken — was bordered by the sacred clan miny’tji of the country at stake. The designs were the heart of the document; the words were the gloss. Two were tabled in the House of Representatives in August 1963, one bearing the designs of the Dhuwa clans, presented on 14 August, the other the Yirritja designs, on 28 August.

The Gove Peninsula near Nhulunbuy, the Country excised for bauxite mining in 1963 — the land at the center of the bark petitions and the case that followed. Photograph by Mark Ireland, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

These were the first traditional documents produced by Aboriginal people to be formally received by the Australian Parliament. Earlier petitions had been attempted and turned aside; what was new here was that the parliament accepted a document in which bark painting, the Yolngu’s own form of authoritative text, stood beside European writing — a tacit acknowledgment, in the act of receiving it, that a Yolngu system of Law existed. A parliamentary committee of inquiry was established. The mine nonetheless went ahead.

So the Yolngu took the argument to court. In what became known as the Gove land-rights case, Milirrpum v Nabalco Pty Ltd, the clans sued the mining company and the Commonwealth, asserting their ancestral title. On 27 April 1971, Justice Richard Blackburn of the Northern Territory Supreme Court delivered his judgment. He found, as a matter of fact, that the Yolngu possessed an established, recognizably legal system — “a subtle and elaborate system” of relationships to land, in the language often cited from the case — and that they had occupied their Country as the ancestral Law required. But he ruled against them on the law, holding that the doctrine of communal native title formed no part of the law that Australia had inherited at settlement. The Yolngu lost. The first serious legal test of Aboriginal land rights in Australia ended in defeat.

The defeat proved generative. The judgment, and the public force of the case, pushed the Whitlam government to establish the Woodward Royal Commission into Aboriginal land rights in 1973–74, and its recommendations issued in the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976, passed under the Fraser government — the first law to grant Aboriginal people inalienable freehold title to land on the basis of traditional ownership. Two decades later the High Court, in Mabo v Queensland (No 2) in 1992 — a case brought by the Torres Strait Islanders of Mer — would reach the conclusion Blackburn had declined to reach, recognizing native title in Australian common law and discarding the legal fiction that the continent had belonged to no one. The argument the Yolngu had begun on bark in 1963 ran, by that long road, into the foundations of Australian law.

Reception and afterlife

The Yolngu carried their Law into the national conversation by more than litigation. In 1988 the elders of Arnhem Land and the Northern Territory presented Prime Minister Bob Hawke, at the Barunga Festival, with a painted statement of Aboriginal aspirations — the Barunga Statement — and Hawke spoke of negotiating a treaty between Aboriginal and other Australians. No treaty followed. In 1991 the band Yothu Yindi — its name the Yolngu term for the mother-and-child relation that orders kinship across the moieties — released “Treaty,” written by members of the band with the musicians Paul Kelly and Peter Garrett, to press the unkept promise. Sung partly in the Gumatj language and built on manikay and yidaki alongside rock instrumentation, it became, in a dance remix, the first song by a mainly Aboriginal band to reach the Australian charts and the first in an Aboriginal language to win wide international attention. The word treaty traveled across the country on a Yolngu beat.

The bark petitions themselves are now held among the founding documents of the nation, displayed in Parliament House in Canberra as objects of state. Yolngu bark painting, once read by outsiders as ethnographic specimen, hangs in the major galleries as one of the great traditions of world art, and its practitioners — the Marika family of the Rirratjingu, the Yunupingu of the Gumatj, and many others — are reckoned among the country’s foremost artists. None of this represents a tradition turning into heritage. The designs that hang in the galleries are the same designs that prove title and carry Law; the songs recorded for the concert stage are the same manikay sung in ceremony on Country.

That continuity is the point the Yolngu have insisted upon, in court and on bark and in song, for more than sixty years. The moieties still divide the world; the Djang’kawu still made the land that the Dhuwa clans hold; the miny’tji still say, to anyone equipped to read them, who belongs to which Country under which Law. The people who painted a parliament’s first Aboriginal document were not asking to be admitted to someone else’s order. They were stating the terms of their own, in the script in which those terms had always been written, and waiting for the nation around them to learn to read it.

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