Unearthing the forgotten history of Oz

Näku Dhäruk The Bark Petitions: How the Yirrkala People Changed the Course of Australian Democracy ★★★★★
Clare Wright
Text Publishing

Few works of history have garnered such lavish praise as Australian history professor and author Clare Wright’s fifth book, Näku Dhäruk The Bark Petitions: How the Yirrkala People Changed the Course of Australian Democracy. The final in her acclaimed, multi-award winning democracy trilogy which began with The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka and continued with You Daughters of Freedom, it prompted fellow Australian history professor Frank Bongiorno to not only acclaim its scholarship and creativity, but to state: “I am in awe of this book. It’s like nothing I’ve ever read.” Best-selling Scottish historian William Dalrymple went even further, hailing Wright as, “the most remarkable and striking voice working on recovering the lost and forgotten pages of Australian history”.

Ten years in the writing, this ground-breaking yet surprisingly propulsive historical narrative chronicles how and why petitions on bark created by the Yolngu people of northeast Arnhem Land in 1963 kick-started Australia’s indigenous land rights movement, a story that is largely unknown within Australia, let alone outside it. Wright considers these bark petitions as pivotal in shaping Australian democracy, and says: “That’s part of the question that underlies the book. Why don’t more people know about them? Why isn’t it part of our lexicon and revered in the same way that the founding documents of American democracy are by Americans?”

Underlying the book is a deep respect and knowledge of Yolngu law, lore, language and the complicated kinship relationships of its 17 clans. Narrated through the eyes of its many characters, it manages like no other narrative — save perhaps the specialised work of anthropologists — to impart a palpable sense of the intricacy and depth of the relationship between indigenous identity and the land itself. It's a relationship so profound that the very words for rupturing that relationship, “colonialism” or even “genocide” fail to fully convey the extent of the damage incurred by that rupture.

As Wright makes clear in Näku Dhäruk the Bark Petitions, is that up until 1963, “it had never occurred to any Yolngu that they weren’t the sovereign owners of their land. It wasn’t until this interaction in 1963 that they realised this thing called British Law, which they knew had come to pass on the east coast, was also in operation where they lived.” Considered exceptional because they were the first Aboriginal Australians to have contact with foreigners, the Yolngu had maintained an equitable trade relationship with Indonesian seafarers the Macassans for at least 500 years, yet had repelled incursions of pastoralists in the late 19th century and early 20th century. In 1931 the government declared the whole of Arnhem Land a reserve for Aboriginal people, which not only meant a permit was required for entry, says Wright, “it was also a way of keeping out the worse effects of the frontier, like alcohol and the fringe-dwelling that was happening in Darwin”. 

But all that was to change. The first hint arrived just before Christmas in 1962, when 29-year-old Yolngu man, Daymbalipu, saw white survey pegs running through the community’s peanut paddock after returning from an all-day picnic organised by the principal of the Yirrkala mission school. The mission school had been established at Yirrkala in 1935 by the Methodist Overseas Mission, which, unlike most other missionaries, sought only to provide the services that the government was not. “There was a school and a church,” says Wright, “but they were not forced to go to either, and were encouraged to practise all rituals, all ceremonies and to continue practising their language — to the extent that the missionaries themselves had to learn Yolngu matha.” Meaning Yolngu tongue, Yolngu matha is a linguistic group of five or six related languages that had been developed into a standardised script by missionary linguist Beulah Lowe.

News of the survey pegs so disturbed Yolngu elders that the superintendent of the Yirrkala mission Reverend Edgar Wells started to investigate, recounts Wright. “And he discovered in January of 1963 that a deal had been made between the Menzies government and the headquarters of the Methodist Overseas Mission in Sydney to grant leases to mine bauxite to this French mining company (Pechiney).” Not only had the Yolngu not been consulted, Wells had also not been informed, but was secretly tipped off by the chair of the northern branch of the mission, who too, had been tipped off by someone else. As her narrative so tellingly reveals, it was a long, fraught road to the lodgement of the bark petitions in July 1963 — a year of agitation for civil rights worldwide — and an even longer one before they were heeded. Typed by Wells’s wife Ann, in both Yolngu matha and English, they were surrounded by clan designs in ochre, charcoal and clay which encoded the relationship between the land and the Yolngu people.

The book’s genesis dates back to 2010 when Wright's then husband Damien, a furniture maker, was invited by Dr Galarrwuy Yunupingu, member of the Gumatj clan of the Yolngu and prominent indigenous leader to visit his community to assess a local tree species’ suitability for furniture-making. Having deemed it highly suitable, Damien was then invited to start a skills and culture based furniture-making workshop there. “And that’s how we all ended up there,” recounts Wright. With three children no longer in nappies, she adds: “It seemed an extraordinary privilege to go live on a remote indigenous community in northeast Arnhem Land. How many get that chance?”

By then Wright had just completed the first draft of what would become her 2014 Stella prize-winning The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka, the first in her trilogy. She was not only adopted into Dr Yunupingu’s family by his fourth wife Valerie, but upon discovering she was an historian, Dr Yunupingu himself (since deceased) asked her to write about the bark petitions and the Yolngu’s struggle to be heard in their quest for land rights. “It was a story that he really wanted told and as I talked to other Yolngu, one that they felt was unfinished business; that it was a sort of open wound or a book that hadn’t [been] closed yet.”

Initially she thought the story would amount to a chapter in a book about mining. “But when I started doing the research I realised that had been nothing written on this of any substance; there had been no historical research done on the ground, certainly no consultative research with the Yolngu, no deep archival research and that it was such a big story it required a book of its own. So I just spent the next 10 years working on this book alone.”

Wright credits her passion for history to “a sort of rootless childhood”. The daughter of American parents who immigrated to Australia from Canada when she was five, she says: “Looking to the past, you are searching for roots in a way. I've always read against the grain of the conventional narrative, and I think that comes from being a first-generation immigrant. When you are shallow rooted in that way, the conventional narratives of a country don’t have the same hold on you, and that gives you a good position as an historian asking critical questions of the past.”

A lot of historical writing, she maintains: “Is written from the future with the benefit of hindsight, and that makes certain things look like they were inevitable, and there is no inevitability about history. It’s not determined by some larger force. It’s determined by the choices that people make, by the decisions they make, the alliances they form, the animosities they play out, the moral compass they follow. And it’s the reason why I write history the way I do, through the eyes of the characters and in such granular detail — this person did this, that person did that and that person responded in that way. People make history,” says Wright. “And I find that a very empowering notion.”

CLARE WRIGHT ON THE BOOKS THAT HAVE INFLUENCED HER

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E Frankweiler, by EL Konigsburg:

This was published in 1967, two years before I was born, and it’s the first book I remember reading independently. I was about 11. It’s about a girl and her little brother who run away and end up living in the metropolitan museum in New York and while they are under cover and secretly living there, they discover a mystery to do with one of the items in the collection.

This book absolutely captured my imagination and has fostered my deep and abiding wish to spend a night undetected in a museum. But I think it also was my first archival impulse, the mystery and suspense of research is really bound up in this book. I re-read it a couple of years ago and realised there’s all sorts of deeper psychological stuff going on for me and for which I related to that little girl at the time. But for my development as an historian, this really sparked my first archival impulse.

Dancing with Strangers, by Inga Clendinning: Clendinning was a real hero of mine long before I joined the history department at La Trobe University and met her for the first time. But Dancing with Strangers was my first real connection with her work, and then I went back and read her back list. It was this book that really gave me the sense that a historian didn’t need to have that objective, distant, scientific detached voice to be able to write good history. What Clendinning did in this book was so lyrical and so beautiful, clearly cleaving very closely to the sources. But what she did, I felt, was take the reader by the hand and guide them through those sources in a companionable, enthusiastic and sympathetic way, which to me exploded the whole notion of historical writing being detached and objective. I felt that really gave me licence to experiment with my writing style as an historian. Dancing with Strangers came out the same year as my first book The Ladies Lounge. That was my PhD thesis; it was written to be published and I think has a very companionable tone to it, but it wasn’t until my next book, The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka, that I took Clendinning’s licence to be more creative and experimental with my writing.

Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman’s Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine, by Sue Monk Kidd: This is another beast entirely. I first came across Monk Kidd as a novelist, she wrote The Secret Life of Bees, which spoke to me at a vulnerable and difficult time in my life. Then I went back to see what else she had written and discovered this memoir she wrote about 10 years before she wrote that novel. What I discovered in this book was this idea of the feminine divine being a female power that had existed before Christianity and patriarchy had snuffed out the idea of women being powerful, before what Kidd calls the “cultural fathers” took over. This book gave me some succour and strength to start to develop my own voice not just as an historian but as a woman and to be able to seek the power in women’s voices and women’s experiences that speak to a deeper truth, or at least an equally valid truth as the patriarchal narratives that I had been fed — that we all had been fed — and internalised, as girls and women.

The Secret River, by Kate Grenville: Clendinning and Grenville famously had a great public discourse over this; Clendininng was deeply offended and critical of The Secret River but I felt it was a book that brought history to people who wouldn’t normally have read it — an important part of our history, the beginning of the frontier wars. What I gleaned from Grenville was a technique that she used for putting dialogue on the page, which was not to use quote marks, but to italicise dialogue. I borrowed that technique, starting with The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka, because I felt that it created a much more intimate, character-driven and, in a sense, novelistic way of relating to those documents from the past. Instead of those quote marks acting like book ends, or obstacles to what the words said, I felt the italicisation of them helped them flow into the narrative. It’s a technique I’ve continued to use ever since.

Song Spirals: Sharing Women’s Wisdom of Country through Songlines by the Gay’wu Group of Women: In my acknowledgments I say if there’s one book people reach for after they’ve read my book, I hope that it’s this one. I owe so much of the wisdom and the grace and the cultural knowledge and the generosity of my approach to writing Yolngu history from this book. It was written by a group of Yolngu sisters in conjunction with some white academics from New South Wales, and abides by the Yolngu principle of Bala ga’lili, which is two-way learning. These women have quite generously offered up stories and songs and reflections from the heart of the Yolngu world, but particularly, again, from the heart of women’s knowledge and women’s business in the Yolngu world. One of the things that this book illuminated for me is that we’re familiar with the idea of Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, but in fact First Nations’ time, storytelling and cosmology exists not in lines, not in a sense of linear progression, but in cycles. And that so much connects with the cycles of nature. As women we are all familiar with the idea that the rhythm of our lives turns cyclically and to understand time as being cyclical or spiralling is, I think, an important intervention into our Western “enlightenment” idea of what progress and growth and linearity mean.