In 1999 an Indigenous festival with a difference was first staged in the Northern Territory. Out in north-east Arnhem Land, the Garma Festival of Traditional Culture has none of the usual drawcards – there’s no footy, no baskbetball, no boxing in a ring under lights, indeed there’s no sense of competition. Nobody goes home with a trophy, but visitors from around the world do come home armed with knowledge and brief, hopefully fertile, experiences with Yolngu culture and its practitioners. Staged over five days in the depths of the dry season at Gulkula, a bush-site overlooking the Gulf of Carpentaria forty kilometres south of Nhulunbuy, the Garma Festival is presented by the Yothu Yindi Foundation, an initiative co-ordinated by local Yolngu clan leaders in an effort to share cultural knowledge with outsiders who have a desire to learn.
In the lead-up to the Garma Festival, Yolngu families stir up dusty roads from remote homelands centres across Arnhem Land, or fly into Gove airport where the interstate and international visitors disembark, the Yolngu settling into designated clan areas on the north-western side of the ceremony grounds at Gulkula.
Last year thirty-five Yidaki (didjeridu) students flew in from Euope, Japan and the USA to learn from Yidaki master Djalu Gurruwiwi in a week-long masterclass. Paying for the privilege, they were shown how to select appropriately termite-hollowed trees, how to cut them, bore them and shape them. Then followed days of learning breathing techniques and traditional rhythms and exploration of the healing powers of the instrument. It’s quite a sight, people with little English learning from an old man whose preferred language is Galpu.
By day, in shady brush shelters surrounding the bunggul (ceremony) ground, workshops are conducted – traditional weaving workshops with Yolngu women creating mats and dilly bags utilising local flora for materials and dyes; bark painting workshops in which guests have the opportunity to learn stories and techniques passed down over generations; carving sessions as men create burial poles, log coffins or whatever the focus of that year’s festival; and men’s workshops in the creation and use of spears for hunting and fishing.
Elsewhere, you’ll find a language tent with linguistic resources giving access to the nuances of Yolngu Matha, the common name for the sixteen dialects spoken in north-east Arnhem Land, and shelters in which information can be gleaned about Dhimurru Land Management’s turtle program and other environmental issues in which Yolngu land managers are working cooperatively with outside agencies. Or you can take a regular bus trip into Buku-Larrngay Arts Museum at Yirrkala, a former Methodist mission on the coast between Gove airport and Nhulunbuy where the original Yirrkala church panels can be seen and bark paintings, carvings and artefacts can be purchased.
Each evening around sunset, guests at Gulkula gather on the edges of the ceremony ground as a couple of clans, painted up in white clay and ochres and brandishing spears or digging sticks enact their parts in a creation story that unfolds through dance throughout the week. Each year the story to be told is changed, so that for Yolngu coming through the ranks of traditional education, it’s a learning experience, broadening their knowledge. Each afternoon another couple of clans dance in, enacting their ancestoral roles in the story, one that is narrated in English each evening by a senior elder. In the past, Gumatj clan leader and Northern Land Council chair Galarrwuy Yunupingu has done the honours.
At sunset the Yolngu return to their camps and the free field kitchen set up to feed them while the guests retire to the corrugated-iron roofed open-air kitchen block on the edge of their camping grounds on the southern side of the ceremony ground. The dining area overlooks the escarpment that tumbles away to spring fed jungles and, far below, flood plains and streams and lagoons, a cluster of ancient banyans in the distance and, beyond, the unspoilt dunes and the whitecaps of the Gulf of Carpentaria
After dinner there are likely to be lectures and video presentations covering local indigenous conservation initiatives or collaborative research projects, perhaps a story telling session for the women around one campfire, another for the men, each with its swapping of stories and songs. And then the stars beckon. So too do tents and tarps.
While most Indigenous festivals have rock ‘n’ roll shows most nights, at Garma it’s reserved for a showcase performance on the final night, Saturday. Among the acts who’ve appeared are Yothu Yindi, Shellie Morris, Jodi Cockatoo Creed, Nitin Sawhney and emerging young bands from across Arnhem Land.
During the week, contemporary music workshops are conducted out at the Yothu Yindi Foundation’s Yirrnga Music Development Studio where selected bands from Arnhem Land get to spend the week working with members of Yothu Yindi and musicians like Nitin Sawhney, Andrew Farriss from INXS and Paul Kelly.
Each year, in addition to the access to the creation of traditional and contemporary arts. crafts and performances, the Garma Festival hosts a high-level forum to sort through ideas that might lead to a more harmonious relationship between black and white Australians.
In 2000 it was an academic forum that sought to forge links between the universities and Yolngu people of higher learning, seeking ways of sharing knowledge in an equitable fashion.
In 2001 it was the Ngaarra Legal Forum, a gathering of judges from various courts across the land, magistrates, prosecutors, Aboriginal Legal Aid directors and solicitors, and overseas speakers like Paul Chartrand, Commissioner of the Aboriginal Justice Implementation Commission in Canada. So group discussion workshops are conducted and reports delivered twice a day with discussions going long into the night around the sheltered dining area.
In 2002 the forum focus was Indigenous People And The Environment.
Andrew McMillan
