End of the dream

After decades of trying to engage with white Australia, Aboriginal leader Yunupingu has admitted defeat -- and retreated to his own kingdom. He tells Nicolas Rothwell why isolation is now the key to his people's survival.

Yunupingu with Gumatj boys at Garma 2019. Picture: Peter Eve

After decades of trying to engage with white Australia, Aboriginal leader Yunupingu has admitted defeat -- and retreated to his own kingdom. He tells Nicolas Rothwell why isolation is now the key to his people's survival.

The bright flags straighten in the breeze. The beat of clapsticks, slow and resonant, begins. A man’s voice, strong and high, cuts through the twilight air – the voice of Yunupingu, veteran leader of Aboriginal politics, the master of these ceremonies, as he invokes the spirits of his ancestors, and prepares once more to stage the funeral rites for a young member of his own clan. The chant lifts up; the refrain of the yidaki (didgeridoo) comes in. Before Yunupingu, on the white sand ceremony ground, dancers, members of his extended family, take up their sinuous movements in perfect, practised rhythm. As if on cue, the light of the evening star shows in the darkening sky.

This is Dhanaya, a huddle of low houses on the beach of Port Bradshaw, near the tip of northeast Arnhem Land – one of the remote outstations, or “homelands”, where the Yolngu people of the region endeavour, at a distance from western influences, to preserve their traditions, and keep a degree of their old culture alive. It is an idyllic-seeming place, rarely visited by outsiders. The settlement here, established in 1987, is Yunupingu’s finest, least-tarnished achievement; increasingly, it is his chosen fiefdom, his home. And it is at Dhanaya, on the veranda of a low-slung house upon the shore that, after four decades at the centre of indigenous political struggles, in the wake of his 60th birthday, Yunupingu’s thoughts are turning to the future, and the tumultuous record of recent years.

Reflection, in such surrounds, comes easily. His whole life seems spread out before him. His parents spent time here with their children when he was a boy; the place is rich in contact history; and, thanks to the interlocking family system he presides over, almost everyone dear to him is close at hand. His second wife, Margaret, from the central desert, lives in one house, with her children and grandchildren; his sisters and nieces are staying next door, along with other close relations and members of his Gumatj clan-group; while in Yunupingu’s own ramshackle dwelling, no more, in fact, than a pair of ATCO containers roofed over and shaded, lives his fourth wife, Valerie Ganambarr, a beautiful woman from a neighbouring clan, together with their three young children and an ill-disciplined blue heeler pup.

Where could be better to rethink the relations of remote-area Aboriginal society with the wider world? And how not to feel the need to do so, as the funeral of his young nephew, who took his own life in dark circumstances a month before, at last unfolds? “We’ll talk about the sadness tomorrow,” says Yunupingu, heavily, and turns instead to the past: the beloved, well-ordered past, when things were all in balance in his people’s geometric, elaborately patterned realm.

Reserved in manner, formal, ill-served by media coverage, Yunupingu, whose entire adulthood has been lived out in the limelight of political prominence, remains, even to many of his closest advisers, a private, solemn, not to say a mystifying man. Much of this air stems from the extreme reticence dictated by Yolngu traditions for dealing with outsiders; much comes from the figure Yunupingu has made of himself. Who lurks behind the image of the feudal lord, dispensing royalty payments to his subjects, presiding over each year’s Garma Festival, crowded around by white admirers, and radiating an air of amused indifference?

Dhanaya is the place to seek the answers. It is Yunupingu’s mind-map. That map has several layers. First comes the level of nature, and geography: the bay’s indented coastline teems with life: crabs patrol it, dolphins cavort in it, there is even a lurking saltwater crocodile, four metres long, Yunupingu’s own totemic animal, which he feeds daily from the beachfront by hand. Second is a more abstract, mythic level, for according to Yolngu tradition, the bay is dotted with creation stories.

“I can tell you about the dreaming of the stingray,” begins Yunupingu, “upstream from here. I can tell you about the waters flowing in and out of the bay, deep red, from stirred-up mud, or blue, clear, bright blue, and the sites of dugongs, and other creatures – all interconnecting.”

And imprinted over this level of religious meanings is the record of history in its various chapters. Long ago, millennia ago, a visiting civilisation’s fleet anchored in Port Bradshaw, at a rock, now largely submerged, known by the name Mawindi. This tale of arrival and anchoring is told along much of the nearby coastline; it originates in the south, near today’s community of Numbulwar. Were these early visitors who left rich gifts behind them ancient Chinese, perhaps, or Japanese? Yunupingu leaves the question open.

He is more specific about a later arrival, a Polynesian ocean canoe, presided over by a woman warrior called Bayini, who was seen centuries ago by old Yolngu men. Bayini traded with them, and left – but her presence still lingers in the region: she is pale, and beautiful, and amorous, and lures men into the scrub. “They reckon sleeping with her is like sleeping in a freezer,” he muses: “You can’t feel anything, you can’t run; people can’t think or remember, they wake in the bush not knowing how they got where they are.”

Much of the detail surrounding this particular story stems from Yunupingu’s venturesome, far-travelling uncle, Dayngumbu, who was caught up long ago in a reprisal dragnet mounted by Territory police after a coastal affray, and transported all the way to Darwin for detention. Released after the Japanese bombing of the city in 1942, he walked homewards, heading east, hundreds of kilometres, reaching as far as Oenpelli and Cape Don, where he settled, with the result that today Yunupingu’s wide net of family connections extends across the breadth of Arnhem Land. This uncle had also been, in youth, a deckhand for the last wave of northern visitors to Port Bradshaw, the Macassan trepang fishermen, from Sulawesi in Indonesia, who were constant fixtures on the Yolngu shore: their curing ovens and tamarind trees are scattered up and down the coast, and many of the dances and sword ceremonies of today’s northeast Arnhem Land were handed down by them.

It is a multiplicit history, summed up in the Gumatj flag for Dhanaya, which Yunupingu devised himself and treasures: so much so, in fact, that he ordered a hundred of them recently from Ron the flagman at Darwin’s National Flags to mark out his little kingdom and its ceremonial ground. The design is painstakingly precise: maroon and blue for the mixing water layers of Port Bradshaw; a pair of long-barbed stingrays; and, at the centre, the anchor that symbolises Mawindi rock, twined round with a rope that ties the Gumatj to their clan home.

After the Macassans, though, other, more permanent visitors came – and it was their arrival that triggered a cascade of devastating changes in the Yolngu universe. In 1935, a Christian mission was established at Yirrkala, already a gathering-point for the region’s clans. Yunupingu attended school there before moving to Brisbane for further studies at the Methodist Bible College. By 1967, when he returned home, plans for bauxite mining around Yirrkala were far advanced. A legal challenge brought by Yolngu leaders was heard in the Northern Territory Supreme Court in 1971; Yunupingu was the interpreter. Pictures from the time show him, thrust upon the stage of national life, thin, shy, watchful, resolved.

Though the case was lost, it served as emotional trigger for the land rights movement and set the course of Yunupingu’s political career. With the passage of the Northern Territory Land Rights Act he joined the fledgling Northern Land Council and served as its chairman, guiding its campaigns for most of the next two decades – decades when he was the best-known spokesman for traditional Aboriginal people, travelling across the country, radiating charisma and prestige. In 1978 he was named Australian of the Year; in 1979 his father, Mungurrawuy, the clan leader of the Gumatj, died.

Power and authority were being concentrated in Yunupingu’s hands: financial influence, too, for the new mining town of Nhulunbuy had risen on the tip of northeast Arnhem Land, an alumina refinery towered above the sacred Gumatj banyan tree, and with the wreckage of the landscape there came, as strange recompense, a flow of royalties.

Yunupingu, political and economic potentate, was by then the closest thing indigenous north Australia had to a ruler: whatever happened in that domain seemed to happen in his orbit, or with reference to him. It was he who presented the Barunga Statement on Aboriginal rights to prime minister Bob Hawke in 1988; he who set up the Garma festival of traditional culture in 1999; and even today, despite the emergence of younger spokesmen across the nation, it is he who leads at the deepest level in indigenous politics: Yunupingu was the moving force behind a landmark constitutional reform petition which he presented to Kevin Rudd at a ceremony this July in Yirrkala.

But leadership so long enjoyed, in such ambiguous circumstances, exerts its toll. The truth is that Yunupingu is the king of a fading kingdom now: drink, drugs and passive welfare payments have done much to destroy the Yolngu paradise in Arnhem Land – and those changes have coincided, most paradoxically, with the coming of land rights and elaborately tailored, costly development programs across the remote communities of the Aboriginal north.

* * *

DURING RECENT YEARS, as the social landscape has worsened and despair has crept in, Yunupingu’s reputation, in many circles, has become dark: he is seen as moody and autocratic; troubles have come to plague his close family and his home community of Ski Beach near Nhulunbuy. These factors go far towards explaining a new pattern in Yunupingu’s life.

Faced with the awful impact of western temptations on his clan’s younger members, he has begun retreating into tradition. Confronted by the collapse in the health of his beloved rock-star brother Mandawuy, the former Yothu Yindi frontman, he has adopted a lifestyle of near-monastic purity. Indeed, Yunupingu’s days are devoted chiefly to ceremonies and to the preservation and handing down of Yolngu song-cycles and systems of belief. His dream of engagement with the wider world of mainstream Australia has died; in its place has come a cold determination to keep his people separate – to survive, as much as possible, on their own terms; to avoid the consultations and blandishments of post-colonial politics.

This position goes far towards explaining the most startling event of Yunupingu’s recent life: an event which unfolded in August last year, right here at Dhanaya, on the beachfront veranda, in deep secret one momentous dry-season day. The cast of characters was implausible: Yunupingu, Mal Brough, the high priest of John Howard’s dramatic Northern Territory intervention, Cape York intellectual Noel Pearson, and Melbourne indigenous professor Marcia Langton. Yunupingu had just publicly condemned the intervention as an infringement of Aboriginal land rights; now, in extended conversation with Brough, he found he and the minister were talking the same language: hatred of drugs and alcohol, a longing for top-grade education, a scorn for work-for-the-dole and the welfare paradigm endemic across indigenous Australia.

Yunupingu spoke out again: his voice, this time endorsing the broad aims of the intervention, shifted the fault-lines in the political landscape and opened the way for new thinking about the best ways to advance the fortunes of indigenous communities. But that thinking stemmed from an awareness of how wide the gap between mainstream and remote Aboriginal Australia had become – an awareness that still burns in him. “The new Prime Minister today seems to have no idea how wide the gap is,” says Yunupingu now, as he looks back on that brief phase of action when the intervention was in full swing. “All we’ve been doing since is chasing government, and the longer we wait, the wider the gap becomes. Labor, Liberal, what’s the difference, I’ve come to think: it’s all politics, it all comes and goes.

“It’s been 12 months since the election, and I’ve seen very little of what this new team has done. Health’s the same, education’s the same, housing’s unchanged, we still have the work-for-the-dole program hanging round our necks. But job opportunities for Aboriginal people? I don’t see that.

“It’s a simple thing to get Aboriginal people on the road to their own future, but I’ve never seen a government that tried to do it. Except Brough: I did open my heart to his kind of leadership. That’s what’s needed in politics: direct, no beating about the bush. He hit the nail on the head, he meant business in fixing up indigenous affairs.

“The truth is Aboriginal societies and people are badly neglected, the Government’s never been seriously committed, long-term, to indigenous rights. We need a new approach. You’ve got to be trained to look after your land in the modern world, to confront the pressure of modernity – to earn money in the contemporary way.”

Well, this is a program, and it is stark – Yunupingu even has specific policy prescriptions – but all this zeal has a background, and a deep source in tradition, as well as being the product of bitter experience. For Yunupingu is the inheritor of a belief in autonomy – a belief that explains much about what he is, and how he acts in his world today. In his determination and his will to lead, he is echoing a cultural pattern, one handed down by his father, Mungurrawuy. “He was a hard, relentless man,” says Yunupingu, “but he was like that for a reason. He was a man of his word, he was a planner, he thought for tomorrow. And he was so brilliant, so accurate in his thinking that he would come to conclusions you wouldn’t ever have dreamt about.”

Mungurrawuy needed to pick a successor: the young Galarrwuy, a child of promise, the favourite from a family of 11 wives and many sons and daughters, was singled out, for his precocious hunting skills and for his reflective ways. “My father would protect me and carry me on his head when I was small, or I would sit on his lap, listening to the clapsticks, and they would sink straight into my ears. I grew up with the music and the song cycles singing in my brains; it’s all recorded, it’s not something I have to look for. My father implanted it in me so I could be like him. He sent me into the future as an image of himself.”

Mungurrawuy had already chosen a name of resonance for his son: Galarrwuy means the horizon, the place where the saltwater meets the sky; a place of yearning, the point of balance that one strives for. But he soon gave his son another name as well: Djingarra, for crystal – clear, clean, sharp. “There was a meaning in that, too,” Yunupingu says. “He wanted me to be a special man. When he was dying, he handed his clapsticks over to me, he moved them over towards me, as I stood by his bedside, he said to me, take them, and then he died. He completed his passing. He took a great deal of his knowledge with him, but whatever he could deliver to me, he did.”

The father wanted his son to know the world, but he was also anxious for him not to be transformed and pulled from contact with his culture by too much outside education. There was a separate teaching: the old Yolngu tradition that Yunupingu now sees as his people’s last best hope. “I’ll take you to another level now,” he says, drawing closer. “I’ll tell you about that. My energy for the tasks before us comes from that teaching, from my father. He always had to reserve and balance his power and his strength and his intelligence, for when you were with him, his tongue could be like fire, to burn you alive, to cut you in pieces, and leave you without words, struggling, gasping for life.”

Mungurrawuy was the clan chief par excellence – the incarnation of the sacred Gumatj crocodile, linked as it is to blazing force, to anger and resolve, hunting or attacking as a flame of fire, radiating power in its every move and word. And, forged in this pattern, such is Yunupingu. “I think of my father all the time,” he says, “I talk about him and I try to be like him. Anything I do I relate to him: every day of my life I think of my actions, and I ask myself if he would approve.”

Hence the flags of Dhanaya, with their totemic symbols; hence the joy in Yunupingu’s heart as he calls his crocodile to shore; hence, too, the air of chill conviction in his dealings with the rival cultures lapping at the edges of the Yolngu world.

But this succession line will be broken – or at least changed – in the next generation. Yunupingu, who wants nothing more than the survival of tradition, looks around him, and he sees no inheritors among his many sons. Instead, he is training his daughter Binmila to follow in his footsteps: “My girls are readier to learn,” he says, in a matter-of-fact way, and then, tellingly, continues: “I’ve got my sons, but they’re too much in their own minds, they want to find out things for themselves; that’s how they choose to be. I’m not going to force them to be like me.”

These words conjure up a picture of Yunupingu and all that he endured to become his father’s heir; they sketch, too, the modern Yolngu realm, and its diversities and disappointments, and the varied life-paths that lie before young men. Most of the new generation of Gumatj boys prefer to be musicians, or to live close to the bright lights of Darwin or Gove. And they have access to money, too. The royalty flows that Yunupingu presides over are both reward and curse. He knows well the trap those funds constitute, for himself, and for his kin.

In fact, almost all Yunupingu’s immediate problems stem from royalty money, and the way he shares it out: a tide of envy is directed at him, based on the presumption that he swims in cash. There is a degree, but only a small, pitiful degree of truth in this.

Each year, the bauxite mine and refinery at Gove, partly on Gumatj land, pays out a tiny slice of its revenue to the Northern Territory Government in royalties, of which one third goes to the clans. The lion’s share of this, 65 per cent, or just over $1.5 million in the last financial year, in turn goes to the Gumatj, and the Gumatj Association decides how it gets spent. Some $360,000 a year is guaranteed to the five main Gumatj families, perhaps 700 people, as their entitlement. Yunupingu, as the association’s chair, draws a salary, $90,000, and has a special chairman’s fund to disburse, $100,000. These sums ensure that much of his life is spent dealing with demands from his poorer cousins for support. A good deal of the royalty money vanishes at once on vehicles for relatives; a quarter of a million a year is spent on funeral ceremony costs. What remains is very little; it runs an office. The famous Gumatj helicopter, emblem of the lavish Yunupingu lifestyle, is in fact a revenue-raising asset, rented out to tourism and mining contractors. But this dribble of unearned income diverts the energies of the Gumatj, and other Yolngu groups, away from any hard engagement with the wage economy: by a bleak twist, the payments for the mine the old Yolngu leaders fought to block have served to sap the will of the next generation. They have done much to leave Yunupingu, a beneficiary of this largesse, marooned – an antique leader in a world few younger people strongly wish to occupy and own. The isolation is distinct: one feels it, and feels a man’s, and a culture’s, fate.

For Yunupingu, by now, in his battle for his traditions and their survival, has managed to make himself into an icon of leadership, a symbol, as much as a living, breathing man. In his father’s perfect image, he is the sheen of ancestry; he is power, and authority, and the essence of the clan. And, like many figures in absolute control over their people, he is on his own.

“I limit my private life,” he says, “to my close family and friends: I tend not to give away my self, who I am, what I’m about; not even to my wives. There’s very little of me that anyone really knows, and it worries me enormously that this core of my self goes unseen. Of course there’s always a part of you that should be reserved, or you become vulnerable. And that’s why I have never opened up completely, to anyone, about my life. I give so much of myself away, in public things, that I have to hold this core of me back, and have a secret self. And when I talk, sometimes, in my thoughts, I tune myself up, so high I can’t even hear myself speaking: and I wonder, then, who understands me – who could understand?”

Gradually, insistently, from such exchanges as this, over hours and days, one comes to see something of Yunupingu as he truly is, rather than as he might wish to be. One sees a leader whose life has been devoted to the task of driving ever onwards, towards his distant goals; a leader half-lost in his own receding dreams.

And perhaps it is because of this context, and the immediacy of the social crisis confronting his world, that Yunupingu has turned abruptly, in the past year or so, to practical measures. The indigenous rights campaigner is now a ground-level activist.

Early in February, Yunupingu threw himself into a fight to persuade the itinerant drinkers from his clan to leave their semi-permanent camps around the township of Nhulunbuy and return to their homelands. It was he who sat there with the drifters and town campers of his extended family, beneath the shade-sails opposite the Woolworths carpark, urging and pleading with his kinsmen, while puzzled locals looked on. In September, in response to an upsurge in petrol-sniffing by Yolngu children in Gove, Yunupingu rounded up as many as he could of those involved and transported them to Dhanaya for hands-on rehabilitation. These are scarcely the actions of a removed, high-handed monarch: for Yunupingu, every member of his clan and its many connected groups is his own flesh and blood.

This new engagement is matched by a deepening contempt for institutional Aboriginal politics, and a flat rejection of the Northern Territory’s Government and land councils. Yunupingu has seen enough: he now believes traditional Aboriginal people must look after themselves; national institutions and indigenous leaders from the non-traditional world have no more appeal to him. The model he prefers is autonomy and financial independence for the Yolngu realm.

* * *

FOR 30 YEARS HE GAVE LIP service to the dream of national and regional indigenous solidarity. Today, he wants to see the Northern Land Council pushed aside. Instead, he believes there should be a Northern Territory “council of traditional leaders”, a body he refers to in language as the “Delak”, which would speak for remote communities. Intriguingly, he would prefer it to have support funds from the private sector: it would negotiate directly over use of the Territory’s vast tracts of Aboriginal-owned land, and it would grow to take over the powers of the existing northern region land council, and direct it.

This is a revolutionary blueprint – one that aims to take back power from the present indigenous elite, and from Territory politicians who claim to speak for the Aboriginal world. “An urbanised contemporary leadership is not helping the situation of indigenous people in the bush,” says Yunupingu. “It never has in the past; most of those leaders stole the show, took over the national body, and left us with nothing.”

Here we have the world-view of a man who has at last rejected everything about the status quo: the governmental structures, the policies, the results. Yunupingu is at the end of the line. He has decided family and culture come first, and last, and it is to them that he returns.

“I’m 60 years old,” he says, “it’s been a long road, and I’m thinking about our lives, and how they have to change. We’ve come to the closing of a chapter in politics, and it hasn’t worked. I aim from now on to commit myself to my immediate family: that’s what I can do – that’s all I can do. Teaching young men and women – stories for country, art for country, conservation for country.”

A new kind of economic program flows logically from this. The multinational mining bauxite at Gove, Rio Tinto, wants to strike a new compact with the Yolngu people. Yunupingu wants to shift from royalty payments to equity: to own the assets of his land, and take the first share of profits from his country, not the last crumbs. In his vision, eventually the Gumatj will not be living on work-for-the-dole payments, drinking and despairing: they will be independent princes, land and investment-rich, players in their own right in the corporate world. It is a vision his brothers share, and its first glimmers are coming into being, with slow steps, on a cattle station set up on Gumatj land, where young Yunupingu family members have begun to work.

But a darker landscape still dominates, and these dreams, of course, are only words – words, nothing more, after four decades of struggling, and leading, and longing. Dusk, like a curtain, descends: the clan chief has new tasks to fulfil. Yunupingu rises, picks up his clapsticks and heads for the ceremonial ground. In his high, keening voice, he sings. His brothers and cousins gather around him; the evening star shines; the funeral chants, shot through with pain and beauty, begin.

Nicolas Rothwell is northern correspondent on The Australian.