In this conversation, Professor Clare Wright, Professor of History and Public Engagement at La Trobe University, talks to me (BroadAgenda editor, Ginger Gorman), about her new book, Ṉäku Dhäruk: The Bark Petitions. We explore the profound historical and cultural significance of these petitions, as well as Professor Wright’s personal connection to the Yolŋu people and their enduring struggle for land rights and recognition.

What are the Yirrkala Bark Petitions and inspired you to write about them?

Ṉäku Dhäruk/the Bark Petitions are a set of four documents or artefacts or artworks (they’ve been called all these things) that were sent by the Yolŋu people of northeast Arnhem Land to four Australian parliamentarians (Prime Minister Robert Menzies, Opposition leader Arthur Calwell and Labor MPs Kim Beazley Snr and Gordon Bryant) in July 1963 to protest against the incursion of mining interests on their lands.  

The petitions, which made eight requests, were typed in two languages – Yolŋu matha and English – then pasted on to bark frames on which the traditional designs, animals, plants and ancestral beings were painted in ochre to represent the clan lands and creation stories of the Miwatj region. The petitions were signed by 9 men and 3 women who had been carefully selected by the Yolŋu elders to represent the various Yolŋu clans.

Two of the petitions were presented to the House of Representatives, the first on 14 August 1963, the second – after the initial one was rejected by Minister for Territories Paul Hasluck – was presented and accepted on 28 August. It’s important to recognise that the petitions did not protest against mining in the region per se.  What they called for was consultation on any decisions that were made about who could come on to their lands and how their lands were to be used as well as compensation for any resources taken from those lands.  These requests accorded to Yolŋu law. Spoiler alert, but suffice to say those requests went unheeded.

The story of Ṉäku Dhäruk/the Bark Petitions has been important to the Yolŋu descendants of those elders who struggled for their human and land rights.  It’s a story that many of today’s leaders and elders, including the strong women, wanted to have told.

They wanted their old people remembered by the rest of Australia. My family had the unique privilege of living with the Gumatj clan in northeast Arnhem Land in 2010. Gumatj leader Dr G Yunupiŋu was particularly keen to have the story told.  

(He had been 15 years old in 1963 and his father Mungurruway was one of the leaders of the protest action.)  I was adopted into the Yolŋu kinship by Dr Yunupiŋu’s fourth wife, Valerie Ganambarr.  I was given the Yolŋu yaku (name) Guymululu, meaning ‘special tree’. I became close to many powerful, commanding Yolŋu women. It was from within this inner circle of family and community that I was effectively tasked with writing the history of Ṉäku Dhäruk/the Bark Petitions, from the perspective of both its white and Yolŋu protagonists, male and female.

Why are they important in terms of Australian history? 

Ṉäku Dhäruk/the Bark Petitions were the first petitions put to the federal Parliament in an Australian language.  They were also the first petitions presented to the federal Parliament to lead directly to a parliamentary enquiry.  They are also the first petitions by Indigenous Australians to assert land rights, and as such are the direct precursor to subsequent land rights legislation as well as the paradigm-shifting native title rulings in Mabo. These factors alone make the petitions important documents in the history of the nation. 

But more than just setting those procedural precedents, Ṉäku Dhäruk/the Bark Petitions can be seen as an attempt by the Yolŋu people to come to a form of diplomatic agreement-making between one sovereign nation and another.  In 1963, the Yolŋu people believed themselves to be nothing but the owners of their lands, acting under their own governance structures, economic autonomy and legal regimes.

In other words, their sovereignty had never been ceded.

Widening the frame, we can also see Ṉäku Dhäruk/the Bark Petitions as a pivotal event in the history of Australian democracy, sitting alongside the Eureka rebellion (1854, workers’ rights, Eureka Flag) and the women’s suffrage movement (1902, womens’ rights, Women’s Suffrage Banner).

That’s why this book is the third instalment of my Democracy Trilogy. The trilogy turns on the material heritage of Australian democracy – flag, banner, bark – but also demonstrates that each moment was about disenfranchised people demanding the right to be heard, to be counted.  Each of these moments/movements was about Voice.

Cover of Naku Dharuk: The Bark Petitions. Picture: Supplied

You discuss the Yolngu Bark Petitions as emblems of Indigenous Australians’ confidence in their land rights. Has this been impacted by The Voice referendum?

The Yolŋu people had no reason to expect their requests for recognition of their political sovereignty and land rights would not be respected. They had been trading and agreement-making with ‘outsiders’ for centuries, strangers who abided by Yolŋu laws.  Their confidence was only truly scorched by losing the Gove Land Rights case which followed on from Ṉäku Dhäruk/the Bark Petitions.  

I started researching and writing this book over a decade ago. The Uluru Statement from the Heart and the Voice referendum were not, therefore, political agendas that were anywhere near my consciousness. I had no barrow to push, just an incredible, unforgettable (yet largely forgotten) story to tell. As the political and social dimensions of those movements played out from 2020, it became clear to me how many similarities there were between the 1963 Ṉäku Dhäruk/the Bark Petitions campaign and the present-day struggles for the right to be heard, the right to meaningful consultation and consent.

Indeed the referendum for a constitutionally enshrined First Nations Voice to Parliament was held in the 60^th anniversary year of Ṉäku Dhäruk/the Bark Petitions.  It is heart-breaking that the majority of Australians – including the Coalition parties – are still not prepared to listen to what our First Australians want to say about their everyday needs as well as their historical and contemporary experiences, inspirations and ambitions.

You mention Dr G Yunupingu’s encouragement for you to hold “crook people” accountable. How do you navigate the balance between accountability and honoring the resistance of the Yolngu people?

This was easy: I wrote from the archives up.  The bad actors in this story made themselves pretty well known to me from the primary sources long before Dr G Yunupiŋu identified them by name to me!

You employ a unique narrative style that blends various voices and perspectives. What inspired you to adopt this ‘spiral’ approach?

I think my narrative style is perhaps only unique to scholarly history writing.  My literary influences are drawn far more from fiction of screen writing than academic discourse.  First, I write narrative non-fiction: the beats are story-driven, not argument-driven.  I also focus on character and write on the heels of the very many characters who contributed to the story of Ṉäku Dhäruk/the Bark Petitions; if they don’t know what’s going to happen next as protagonists, neither do we as readers.

I think this approach is more reflective of the way that people live their lives, people then and people now.  I hope it shows that people (ie: us) make history every day in the choices they make, the alliances they form, the values they honour, the rights and liberties they struggle for, the way they act as either ‘enlargers’ or ‘punishers’, to borrow from Manning Clark.

I think that it’s also important to amplify the symphonic nature of the past.  There were/are a lot of voices, trying to communicate their hopes, aspirations, grievances and principles.  Drawing only from the colonial/national archive tends to lower the volume on this polyglot, polyvocal past.  Finally, in Ṉäku Dhäruk/the Bark Petitions I have also tried to insert the imperatives of Yolŋu history-making and storytelling, which tend to embrace temporalities that loop and spiral and return rather than only western enlightenment ideas of time and space, which tend to follow chronological, teleological ideas of progress: beginning, middle, end.

Professor Wright spent thousands of hours working with Yolngu Elders while she wrote and researched her book. Picture: Supplied

You mention that the bark petitions are sometimes seen as “colonial trophies.” How can we shift the narrative to ensure that their significance is fully understood and respected in today’s context?

It was a huge turning point in my thinking, years into the research for this book, when I thought to ask Dr G’s what the Bark Petitions were called in Yolŋu Matha.  It had never occurred to me before that the Yolŋu would have their own language.  His answer took some time to fully digest: Ṉäku Dhäruk.  Ṉäku, meaning ‘bark’, for the material that is used for bark painting.  And Dhäruk, meaning ‘the word’ or a ‘message’ or a meeting out of which a collective message or outcome will be decided.

There was no sense of a ‘petition’ at all.  We understand petitioning as a means by which a subservient people requests something  a higher power.  ‘Your servants humble pray’ is part of the desiterata of the Westminster petition.  But the Yolŋu had no such hierarchies in mind.  They saw themselves as equals, on the same level, negotiating across, not begging up.  Understanding Ṉäku Dhäruk/the Bark Petitions as gifts of diplomacy changes the whole power dynamic of the situation. And gives us hope, I think, that such anti-colonial relationships of political equality might exist between First Australians and settler Australians again.

• Ṉäku Dhäruk: The Bark Petitions is out now

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