Clare Wright’s Näku Dhäruk: The Bark Petitions – subtitled “how the people of Yirrkala changed the course of Australian democracy” – tells a story that is already well known.

In August 1963, Yolngu living at the Yirrkala Methodist Mission in Arnhem Land submitted two petitions to the Australian Parliament. Each combined paintings on bark with typed text, in both English and Gumatj. The painted images symbolised the petitioners’ ownership under customary law of certain lands, close to the mission, which were threatened by the Menzies government when it excised a portion, rich in bauxite, from the Arnhem Land Reserve.

The petitions asked parliament to appoint a committee to “hear the views of the Yirrkala people before permitting the excision of the land”. Some members had doubts whether the petition represented the community’s views, so Yolngu sent a second petition.

Parliament appointed a committee, which confirmed the government had not consulted Yolngu. The committee did not challenge the legality or fairness of the excision; it recommended measures it considered protective of Yolngu interests while mining went ahead.

Review: Näku Dhäruk, The Bark Petitions: How the people of Yirrkala changed the course of Australian democracy – Clare Wright (Text)

Wright suggests this encounter “changed the power dynamics of hunter and hunted, possessor and possessed”, because Yolngu were enacting their citizenship by speaking “truth to the power of the colonial (Commonwealth) authorities”. She likens the petitions to the Eureka Flag of the 1850s and the women’s suffrage banner from the 1890s. The flag, the banner and the bark “constitute the material heritage of Australian democracy”. They are emblems of the popular demand to be heard.

Heard did not mean heeded, as Wright points out. In 1971, the Northern Territory Supreme Court formally rejected Yirrkala residents’ claim that they held title to their land by customary law.

An alumina refinery commenced operations in 1972. In the town built to service the refinery – Nhulunbuy, population 5,000 in 1973 – alcohol was available. In 1974, the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs documented changes, many destructive, with which Yolngu had been coping.

The bark petitions attracted much public sympathy for “land rights”, however, and the Aboriginal Land Rights (NT) Act in 1976 gave all the First Nations of Arnhem Land Reserve freehold title. Both the Rirratjingu and Gumatj clans have taken advantage of their proximity (and customary entitlement) to the mine to develop enterprises servicing bauxite mining, including the refinery demolition and clean-up, now the ore has been exhausted.

Yirrkala has for many years hosted the annual Garma Festival, where Yolngu present themselves (and are credited in media reports) as the preeminent ambassadors of First Nations Australians.

Right to territory

The Yolngu Bark Petitions were immediately recognised by many as emblems of the unshakeable confidence of Indigenous Australians in their right to their territory. The High Court eventually ruled, in the 1992 Mabo decision, that “native title” must be part of Australian law. Through the Native Title Act (1993), 65% of Australia will be subject to some legislated Indigenous interest by 2030. From little things, big things grow.

An Indigenous colleague recently told me that, as the bark petitions were not fully reciprocated, they remain “colonial trophies”. Displayed in a museum or archive they can be fetishised as tokens of Australians’ genius for “democracy” – like the flag and the banner.

Wright discourages such settler-colonial recuperation of their meaning when she writes that the bark petitions “demonstrated the political sophistication of a people engaging in acts of statesmanship between two nations by attempting to speak one language: the language of diplomacy”.

I understand the “people” in this sentence to refer to Yolngu. Wright persistently evokes their intense attachment to the land in dispute. She never lets the reader forget that the Yolngu worldview, glimpsed in the bark petitions, is richly poetic and deeply felt, and that, in 1963, it was beyond most Australians’ empathy.

But the bulk of this long narrative is not about Yolngu. It is about the non-Yolngu who responded first to the Yolngu plea, and then to each other’s responses. There was nothing “sophisticated” in these responses. Wright shows them to be discomfited and disunified – in their understanding of assimilation policy and government-mission relationships.

Some wondered whether, behind the bark petitions, communists were at work. Others, attuned to Yolngu, experienced a paradigm shift. Among the Methodists who oversaw the Mission, the divisions cost Edgar Wells his job as Yirrkala superintendent.

Others before Wright have written well of the profound divisions among those who, in 1963, understood themselves to be responsible for Yolngu wellbeing: Edgar Wells in Reward and Punishment in Arnhem Land 1962-63 (1982); John Harris in One Blood (1990); Bain Attwood in Rights for Aborigines (2003); Jennifer Clark in Aborigines and Activism (2008).

What distinguishes Wright’s account of the disorder among settler authorities is the length, detail and intimacy of her narration. Her “intimate storytelling” takes the reader inside the heads of the missionaries, legislators and public servants.

Wright’s sources enable her to do this. She draws on the diaries, notebooks, manuscripts, letters, photographs, slides, audio and film recordings, newspaper clippings, and art that comprise the privately held Edgar and Anne Wells collection. This material is “the nucleus of this book”, she states. “I am the first person outside the family to view it”.

Less significant, but important in her characterisation of Edgar Wells, are letters (now published) that the Yirrkala teacher Beth Graham wrote to her family, and an unpublished memoir by school principal Ron Croxford, part of the “Croxford Collection”.

Intimate storytelling

Wright’s storytelling achieves “intimacy” by making words, phrases and sentences drawn from Yirrkala mission sources, Hansard and government correspondence appear – italicised – within her own sentences. These quotations are not distinguished from her own words by quotation marks or indentation – the standard markers of quotation.

Here is an example, from “inside” Edgar Wells. In this passage, Wright narrates Wells writing to his ally John Jago (Methodist Commission on Aboriginal Affairs) about the response of Cecil Gribble (General Secretary, Methodist Overseas Mission) to the excision and petitions:

“As for Gribble, well he had swallowed the propaganda of the politicians who did the job and is now feverishly justifying that position. It was sickening to see how Gribble had manipulated the meeting with the Yolngu men under the mission house after the church opening. He’d reported to anyone who would listen, Jago included, that the people themselves seem to me to welcome the prospect of being near this mining development. Far from objecting to industry’s advent in the region, Gribble said, they find their horizons expanding somewhat through it.”

There are at least two points of view about Yolngu’s interests in this passage. There is Wells’ critical account of Gribble’s position (the first italics). And there is Gribble’s position (in the second and third italics).

But it is not clear whether the words that I am labelling as Gribble’s point of view are quotes from a document authored by Gribble or words chosen by Wells, in his letter to Jago, to state what he (Wells) understands Gribble’s views to be.

There is possibly a third point of view – Wright’s – in the sentence that follows this passage: “It was quite a thought, really: a people whose minds held an encyclopedic knowledge of every contour of the land, sea and sky having their perspective extended even further!”

In that sentence, is not Wright inviting the reader to laugh at Gribble’s point of view? If so, is she doing this from what she imagines to be the point of view of the Yolngu petitioners?

There is no endnote giving the sources of this passage. Putting aside, for the moment, the question of whether there should be, let us acknowledge the artfulness of a narrative technique that cascades and slides, in so few words, between two, three or four points of view. Well might one of the ten endorsers of the book refer to its “kaleidoscopic prose”. Wright performs this page after page.

Her “intimate storytelling” has its precedent in the novel – in particular, what literary theory calls “free indirect speech”. This is a means of representing the thought or speech of a character in the context of a narrator’s discourse. It is exemplified in the work of (among others) Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf.

In Australia’s historiography, Manning Clark was the foremost practitioner of “free indirect” narration. Mark McKenna (one of the ten endorsers of Näku Dhäruk) explains, in his admirable An Eye for Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark (2011), that as early as 1940 Clark began to detest the ways that he was taught to write at Oxford. In his six-volume History of Australia, Clark sought to break with “the ‘positivistic spirit’ and ‘objective reality’ that characterised scholarly history”.

McKenna recalls that in his own youth he was unsure what to make of Clark’s history, in which primary sources “blended so seamlessly with his own prose that it was impossible to tell who was speaking”.

Wright, in this respect, is Clark’s successor. Perhaps one reason that her publisher has marshalled ten distinguished endorsers of Näku Dhäruk is to assure us that a narrative technique that scandalised “positivists” in 1962 could be welcomed in 2024 as “so much more than an historical account” and a “feat of scholarship and creativity”.

There are endnotes in this book – 459 references to sources of the kind we expect in scholarly histories: published books, interviews (archived or conducted by Wright), newspapers, government and church archives, library-deposited papers of politicians. But a huge proportion of the italicised words – that is, quoted utterances by named actors – are not sourced to any particular document. There are no endnotes to the evidentiary “nucleus”: the Wells archive.

Does this compromise the book’s “truth-telling”? That depends. In Näku Dhäruk, we find three kinds of intellectual authority that correspond, I suggest, to Max Weber’s three kinds of political authority: traditional, bureaucratic, charismatic.

Wright presents Yolngu knowledge, the “title deeds” asserted on bark as miny/tji (sacred designs), as having “traditional” authority. If we understand “bureaucracy” as rule-governed impersonality, then all text footnoted to a primary source that any researcher could examine possesses “bureaucratic” authority.

The credibility of passages that are not so sourced – the bulk of the “intimate storytelling” – rests on the reader’s belief in the author’s singular fitness to tell the story. Not only has Wright had unique access to the book’s “nucleus”, she assures us that Galarrwuy Yunupingu believed in her. In August 2021, he urged her to write a story that would hold some “crook people” responsible for the excision of the land, while crediting Yolngu for resisting it. The closing vignette climaxes Wright’s evocation of her own charismatic authority.

Timothy Michael Rowse, Emeritus Professor, History, Western Sydney University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.