Yunupingu: Inspiring leader gave his people vision and heart

Yunupingu, 74, who died at home in his beloved northeast Arnhem Land on Monday, walked in two worlds with authority, power and grace, and he worked to make them whole, as Anthony Albanese said in his tribute to this outstanding Australian. Yunupingu’s achievements on behalf of his people were immense: land rights; major long-term royalty deals offering job opportunities with resources companies; developing new enterprises; and helping make the Garma Festival into a beacon for community, business and political leaders and guests such as US ambassador Caroline Kennedy, who attended last year. Yunupingu, Ms Kennedy recalled on Monday, “spoke about himself as fire, one of his totems, which ‘must burn until there is nothing left’ ”. Successive prime ministers travelled to Garma to seek out Yunupingu. All were friendly, he said, “but I marked them hard”.

Hours after his death, his daughter, Binmila Yunupingu, said her father “lived his entire life on his land, surrounded by the sound of bilma (clapsticks), yidaki (didgeridoo) and the manikay (sacred song) and dhulang (sacred designs) of our people. He was born on our land … and he died on our land secure in the knowledge that his life’s work was secure.” But that work was not complete. “The task remains: to reconcile with the truth, to find the unity and achieve the settlement,” he wrote in The Monthly in 2016. “A prime minister must lead it and complete it. The leader of the nation should accept his or her commission and simply say what he or she thinks is right, and put that forward for the nation to correct, or to accept, or to reject. Let us have an honest answer from the Australian people to an honest question.”

As a passionate proponent of the Indigenous voice to parliament, he said: “At Uluru we started a fire, a fire we hope burns bright for Australia.” By 2019, angered with the slowness of the process, Yunupingu told then Indigenous Australians minister Ken Wyatt at Garma if the government did not come back with an answer, the Yolngu people would dismiss the Constitution by throwing it away. “It will be wonderful,” he said. “The Yolngu people will stand on the land and see if that document will float away into the ocean.”

Almost 60 years earlier, Yunupingu cut his political teeth in the land rights movement in response to the Nabalco company’s lease to mine bauxite on the Gove Peninsula. In 1963 the Menzies government excised more than 300sq km of land from the then Arnhem Land Aboriginal reserve for bauxite mining without consulting the Indigenous inhabitants. Yunupingu was 15 at the time, when he helped draft the plea against the decision, the Yirrkala bark petitions, that were signed by his father, Mangurrawuy Yunupingu, and his uncle, Djalalingba Yunupingu. Yunupingu was with his father when he met prime minister Robert Menzies. When the petitions failed, the elders turned to the legal system, demanding their voices be heard. Yunupingu helped interpret for the eldersand helped explain their culture, during the 1971 Gove land rights case. While the case ultimately failed, it helped trigger a determined drive for land rights.

After these were won in the Aboriginal Land Rights Northern Territory Act (1976), Yunupingu became inaugural chairman of the Northern Land Council. He richly deserved his Australian of the Year award in 1978. As chairman, businesses he established to employ Yolngu people included a cattle station, a nursery, a timber mill and the Gumatj-owned Gulkula Bauxite Mine, the first Aboriginal-owned and operated mine in Australia. Last year he entered a partnership with NASA to open a space base on Yolngu land, reflecting his aspirations for his people. He fought hard for their stakes in the real economy.

On Monday, a spokesman for the Yothu Yindi Foundation, a peak advocacy body for Indigenous Australians that Yunupingu helped establish, acknowledged he was “ first and foremost a leader of his people, whose welfare was his most pressing concern and responsibility”. Dedicated to their wellbeing, Yunupingu regarded welfare as “a killer”, a Western innovation that “saps the will to work, and hence to learn”. The welfare system, he argued correctly, encouraged dependency, with adverse consequences for the psychology of Indigenous people as well as for the economics of their small-scale societies. Controlled by outsiders and granted by government, welfare damaged community cohesion and self-respect, he told The Australian in 2011. Those views aligned him with the leading Indigenous policy thinkers of the “responsibilities” school, Cape York leader Noel Pearson and University of Melbourne academic Marcia Langton.

While initially opposing the Howard government’s NT emergency intervention in 2007 in response to the abuse of Indigenous children, Yunupingu altered his view for practical reasons, former Indigenous affairs minister Mal Brough recalled on Monday. “When he opened up, he spoke about the heart and the pain and the misunderstandings of what homelands are, and how people try to escape from the pain, then he supported the intervention,” Mr Brough recalled. “It was a challenging thing to do.” Yunupingu was visionary as well as practical, and his dedication to the education of youngsters in his clan prompted him, two years ago, to establish a school at Gunyangara, his birthplace on the Gove Peninsula, with Barker College, Studio Schools Australia and Melbourne University. The school blends the Australian Curriculum with traditional Yolngu teachings and language.

Yunupingu’s first name, which his family has asked to be no longer used, means “the area on the horizon where the sea merges with the sky”. His parents also gave him a name, not published, that means “crystal clear”. Yunupingu, appropriately, means “rock”, which he was to his family, his clan, to Indigenous people and to the nation.

Writing in 2016, he recalled growing up on the beach at Yirrkala, living with his family in a series of humpies made out of bent iron, stringybark and paperbark designed to keep out the rain. Reflecting on his life’s work, he had mixed feelings: “I feel a deep sadness at times, yet I know that I have done much that is useful. I know that I have secured my family’s birthright – we will not drift off with the tide; we will stand and endure, and our names will pass down through the decades and the centuries.” Yunupingu “now walks in another place”, the Prime Minister said on Monday, “but he has left such great footsteps for us to follow here in this one”. May his great soul rest in peace.