Leaders and VIPs to attend memorial for land rights champion Yunupingu

Dignitaries will join Yolngu speakers at the memorial for land rights giant Yunupingu in northeast Arnhem Land on Thursday.

Yunupingu. Picture: Peter Eve, Yothu Yindi Foundation

Anthony Albanese, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and one of global miner Rio Tinto’s most senior executives will join Yolngu speakers at the memorial for land rights giant Yunupingu in northeast Arnhem Land on Thursday.

Yunupingu’s longtime friend, actor Jack Thompson, and US ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy are among other dignitaries who will join Yunupingu’s family to pay their respects at Gunyangara, the community he established more than 40 years ago away from the Yirrkala mission where he grew up.

Mr Thompson will speak at the service while Ms Kennedy will be among the seated guests.

Ms Kennedy became an instant supporter of Yunupingu’s at the Garma festival last year when she saw Yolngu students thriving in bilingual classrooms at the small, independent school that he established in 2021.

Ms Kennedy arranged for the children at Dhupuma Barker school to have a Zoom call with astronauts at the International Space Station.

A Gumatj ceremony named fire – Yunupingu’s totem – will begin the memorial for the clan leader who played a role in every chapter of Indigenous affairs for 60 years.

He was 15 in 1963 when he helped his father draft the Yirrkala Bark Petitions – a plea against bauxite mining in Gove – that led ultimately to the nation’s first land rights laws.

Yunupingu advised on those laws then used them to advocate for Indigenous people across the top end in his role as head of the Northern Land Council. A succession of prime ministers came to him at Garma, the annual celebration of Indigenous culture he created with his brother Dr M. Yunupingu at Gulkula.

Mr Albanese’s eulogy, to be delivered on Yunupingu’s homelands at Gunyangara, acknowledges a profound legacy.

“He had every right to be cynical, but he wasn’t,” Mr Albanese says in his eulogy.

“No matter how often Australia let him down, he kept striving to have us rise to his level of integrity. And as he did, what Yunupingu helped us all to see was not the reinvention of Australia, but the realisation of an even greater one.”

As a teenager, Yunupingu went to a Bible college in Brisbane and on Thursday, two Yolngu singers will perform an opening hymn, Amazing Grace, at his memorial. Yunupingu’s daughter Binmila Yunupingu and the chief executive of his Yothu Yindi Foundation, Denise Bowden, will be among the speakers.

Those invited to deliver tributes at Thursday’s memorial include Rio Tinto’s chief executive in Australia Kellie Parker. This is partly because Rio Tinto was supportive of Yunupingu’s vision for a Yolngu-owned bauxite mine and related commercial ventures now operating near Gove and employing Yolngu people.

Ms Parker’s invitation is also an acknowledgment of the historic 2011 Gove mining agreement that Rio Tinto struck with the Yolngu traditional owners.

It was the first time since mining at Gove began that a deal had been negotiated with Yolngu people. It included a range of financial, contractual, asset and employment benefits for Aboriginal traditional owners.

Guests include Cape York Institute founder Noel Pearson and Indigenous researcher and public intellectual Marcia Langton, friends and collaborators with Yunupingu for many years.

Yunupingu’s memorial comes after six days of ceremony featuring traditional Yolngu dance and song called Manikay and Bunggul. It is expected that Yunupingu will be buried privately at Gunyangara next week.