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Galarrwuy Yunupingu: end of the dream

By Nicolas Rothwell

5 December 2008 - AFTER decades of trying to engage with white Australia, Aboriginal leader Galarrwuy Yunupingu has admitted defeat - and retreated to his own kingdom.

He tells Nicolas Rothwell in The Weekend Australian Magazine why isolation is now the key to his people’s survival. Here is an extract:

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 Galarrwuy 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.

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.

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.

Source: The Australian

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