# Yunupiŋu played the long game on native title – and has finally won

## By Clare Wright

Yunupiŋu was 15 years old when the Yirrkala Bark Petitions – or _Ṉäku Dhäruk_ in the Yolŋu language – were sent to Canberra from his home in north-east Arnhem Land and presented to the House of Representatives in August 1963. The “petitions” sought parliamentary intervention after the Menzies government excised a portion of the Arnhem Land Reserve and covertly issued licences to a French company to mine bauxite on Yolŋu land. The text of the petitions was typed in English and Yolŋu _matha_ (language) and stuck on to stringy-bark frames painted with the traditional signs and symbols that, if you knew how to read them, proclaimed Yolŋu sovereignty.

Though a precocious student at the Yirrkala Methodist mission school, Yunupiŋu was deemed too young to be a signatory by the clan elders, including his father, Mungurruway. That task was appointed by the ŋärra – Yolŋu parliament – to nine men and three women between the age of 18 and 36, literate representatives of the 17 clans of the Yolŋu nation who were sending their bark emissaries to the federal capital of the Australian nation.

This unique act of political diplomacy did not attempt to block mining but instead sought three outcomes fundamental to Yolŋu law: consultation before coming on to land; consent before taking any resources from that land; and compensation for any resources extracted. Yolŋu had to abide with these laws in respect of their own territorial clan borders. Macassan traders had been complying with such Yolŋu domestic and foreign policy regulations for centuries.

Yunupiŋu’s name mightn’t have been written on the bark but his quick, curious eyes were trained on his elders’ dignified attempt at agreement-making with the commonwealth, his searching face looking up to the future. Indeed, when the principal of the Yirrkala mission school held a mock election in mid-1963, ahead of the federal election that Menzies would contest later that year with a knife-edge, one-seat majority – and the first election in which  would enjoy the federal franchise – Yunupiŋu was voted prime minister by his student peers.

Three years later, Yunupiŋu was one of only a handful of Yolŋu boys sent away to bible school in Brisbane. Did he want to go into the church, become a minister? I asked him in a series of conversations we conducted in his home on the Gumatj homelands at Gunyaŋgara in 2021, marooned in his beloved Jason recliner chair, one leg short after kidney disease had extracted its rueful price. (He called what we were doing over those weeks _ŋarraku dhäwu landrightsbuy_ – telling “my land rights story”.)

No, he told me. He went to Brisbane to learn about “the games that they played”. Why? “To look after the elders.” Yunupiŋu wanted to learn how leadership in the white world worked. His ambition, he said, was not to join them, but to know their game so as to beat them at it, fair and square. To do this he needed to learn how to be a leader “in both ways”. To live in two worlds. But he was crystal-clear on one score: his two-ways education was necessary to protect and defend “the oldest way, the Yolŋu way”.

The generous gift of the Näku Dhäruk | Bark Petitions having been rejected and the Menzies government re-installed in a landslide, Yunupiŋu first put his vigilance to work in acting as translator for his father and other elders in Milirrpum v Nabalco, known as the Gove land rights case. Handing down his decision in 1971 – and despite the repeat diplomacy of the elders giving him unprecedented access to their secret sacred knowledge of country – Justice Blackburn rejected the notion of native title.

In 2019, over half a century after Mungurruway and other clan leaders first asked for a voice in the decisions being made about their country and fate, Yunupiŋu lobbed the land rights ball back in the federal court. On behalf of the Gumatj people, he launched a claim for compensation over the impact of five decades of mining on lands which, he argued, had not been acquired under just terms. (“Just terms,” it seems, being a legal precept of both the Australian constitution and Yolŋu _rom_/law.)

The federal court found in Yunupiŋu’s favour but the commonwealth was not prepared to concede just yet. The Labor government – appearing to want to turn back the sands that Whitlam began pouring into Vincent Lingiari’s open hand in 1975, a legal hourglass flipped – appealed to the high court.

Like Eddie Mabo, who did not live to see the court decision that would overturn the legal fiction of _terra nullius_ by which Australia’s First Nations had been dispossessed of their land – their sovereignty breached and their property stolen – Yunupiŋu was not in the high court of Australia to see the government’s appeal quashed. He passed away in April 2023.

Outside the court, Djawa Yunupiŋu saluted his late older brother as the “mastermind” behind the endeavour to safeguard the future of his people.

“He was the one who had the vision,” Djawa said.

As a watchful, reverent teenager, Yunupiŋu determined to master the white man’s game. He played for his ancestors, his elders, his children and his grandchildren. He played hard. He played the long game.

On Wednesday, the high court of Australia .

“Native title recognises that, according to their laws and customs, Indigenous Australians have a connection with country,” the judgment read.

“It is a connection which existed and persisted before and beyond settlement, before and beyond the assertion of sovereignty and before and beyond federation.”

“It is older and deeper than the constitution.”

In one of our interview sessions, Yunupiŋu proposed a historical hypothetical: what if Blackburn had to face Yolŋu law? Would the scales of Yolŋu justice weigh in his favour? What would a Makarrata process have looked like for a man who had not listened to and respected the elders?

Yunupiŋu gameplanned this idea for a while, animated, fire in his eyes. He concluded: “Everybody stands in front of the law. No one escapes judgment.”

“A judgment once and for all.”

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