Yolngu

Everything in Yolngu country belongs to one of two halves. Dhuwa and Yirritja divide people, clans, land, water, songs, designs, ceremonies and the plants and animals themselves, and the division is not a classification laid over the world afterward but the structure the world is understood to have. A person is born into the father's half and must marry into the other, so the two halves are permanently dependent on each other for the continuation of both, and a ceremony belonging to one half requires people of the other to conduct parts of it. A clan's songs, its designs and its stretch of country are its own property, held and transmitted by named people, so that a design painted on bark or on a body is title to that country as much as it is decoration. That last point explains why Yolngu religion has an unusual public record.

In 1963, when the Commonwealth excised part of the Arnhem Land reserve for bauxite mining without consulting the people whose country it was, Yolngu leaders at Yirrkala sent the House of Representatives a petition typed in Gumatj and in English and mounted on painted bark, using the clan designs as the statement of ownership they already were. The Yirrkala bark petitions are now held among the founding documents of Australian democracy. The Gove land rights case that followed in 1971 put the Yolngu religious relationship to country before an Australian court, which found against them, and in doing so made the argument for legislation instead.

Yolngu religion is better documented than that of most Aboriginal nations, and the reason is not that less of it is restricted. It is that Yolngu leaders have repeatedly decided to present parts of it deliberately, in their own terms and for particular purposes. The bark petitions did this in 1963. The Yirrkala church panels, painted in the 1960s by senior men of both moieties for a mission church, set out clan narrative and design at monumental scale in a building where they could be seen.

The Saltwater bark paintings of the late 1990s were made to assert sea rights and were afterwards exhibited and published. Ronald and Catherine Berndt worked in Arnhem Land from the 1940s and produced a large body of published ethnography, and Yolngu knowledge holders have since collaborated with linguists, ethnomusicologists and astronomers on work published under joint authorship. Djulpan, the canoe of three brothers formed from the stars a Greek list calls Orion's belt, is in this atlas because of that kind of work.

None of it makes the whole of the tradition public. There is Yolngu knowledge restricted by clan, by moiety, by age and by initiation, and it is not in the literature; the absence of an account of something is not evidence that no account exists, only that none has been released. What the record contains is material Yolngu chose to put there, and for a living tradition that is the only kind of documentation this atlas treats as usable.