iDIDJ Australia Didgeridoo Cultural Hub

Garma consensus for local solutions
Nicolas Rothwell
The Australian August 23, 2010

Traditional dancers celebrate the opening of the 2009 Garma Festival, not only a musical feast but a forum in which to brainstorm indigenous policy ideas. Picture: Renee Nowytarger Source: The Australian

A new commitment to education is galvanising this year's festival among the Yolngu in Arnhem Land

IT is the cool season in the Top End, when dew falls, soft winds blow and indigenous policy experts eagerly head north.

But this year's Garma Festival at the northeast tip of Arnhem Land marks a fresh start for Australia's best established Aboriginal cultural event: new plans, new hopes, new management after a brief, brutal power struggle, even what seems at first like a new slogan: "Looking up to the future".

That slogan, though, is rooted in nostalgia: it was the motto of the region's old Dhupuma boarding college, which, in its heyday four decades ago, was Australia's most successful remote area school for indigenous students.

The return of education to the top of the agenda reflects the controlling hand now being taken once more by Garma's first architect, Gumatj clan leader Galarrwuy Yunupingu, and the revival of his longing for a dedicated learning institute, a college that would build bridges between Western disciplines and the knowledge systems of the region's Yolngu people.

The Garma Festival's forum routinely attracts the key organisation men and women of Aboriginal Australia and the support class of consultants and development gurus who track their every move. In the past it has tended to generate little beyond worthy verbiage.

This year, though, it is unfolding at a hinge time in indigenous affairs: established pieties have failed. The commonwealth government has begun dismantling passive welfare systems in the Northern Territory; novel ways of structuring remote community life are still on the drawing board.

The federal opposition, now abruptly a regime in waiting, has its own plans for drastic economic and education reform in the bush. This is also the first time Garma has been held in the middle of a federal election campaign, when its brainstorming sessions have a chance of influencing policy.

It falls three years into the NT emergency intervention, and precisely at the midpoint of the NT government's fixed parliamentary term, as reports and inquiries make all too plain the withering of governmental capacities in Darwin, in child protection, housing, education and the key underpinnings of remote service delivery.

Garma's discussion topics mirror this landscape: the power politics behind the festival are also a product of the ideological arguments and struggles for influence across the region.

Further questions, barbed and urgent, lurk behind the surface agenda. Indigenous leaders in the tradition-based societies of the centre and north are seeking new ways to preserve Aboriginal languages and cultures, and craft constructive relations with the wider Australia. Above all, they want to establish a stable social space for indigenous people, a way to hold land, develop it and educate their people to stand on equal terms.

Where do Aboriginal societies fit into the nation's architecture? At the height of his popularity, exactly two years ago, former prime minister Kevin Rudd came to Yirrkala, the Yolngu capital, just down the road from the Garma Festival site of Gulkula, and was presented with a petition by Yunupingu and senior clan leaders, asking him to define Aboriginal rights in the Australian Constitution. John Howard had proposed just such a change in his last, failed campaign, but Rudd, for all his pride in apology, deferred considering the idea until a second Labor term.

What the Yolngu, like all tradition-based groups, most wanted from mainstream Australia's leader was secure tenure of their land, and in the Gove Peninsula where Garma unfolds, the issue burns brightly: much of the area was expropriated in the 1970s, before the land rights era, and it now hosts a vast bauxite mine, a refinery and a service town.

When the emergency response was proclaimed in mid-2007, and seemed to reprise that first land expropriation, the Garma Festival was the scene of a serried protest; but shortly after that indignant rally, Yunupingu was locked in talks with the intervention's chief designer, Mal Brough, and the head of Howard's cabinet department, Peter Shergold: those talks, in which Cape York leader Noel Pearson and indigenous academic Marcia Langton took also part, yielded a memorandum of understanding and a new model for Aboriginal land-holding, with 99-year leasing under a head of agreement held by traditional owners.

This model seemed to resolve the contradictions between Aboriginal land rights and the need for transferrable property titles as a basis for economic development in remote communities, but the plan was shelved after the 2007 federal election, and lease negotiations on a different basis are still advancing at glacial pace across the Top End.

Behind Yunupingu's recent politics is the goal of local autonomy for his people: land tenure backed by a viable economy and representative institutions. Over recent years he has pushed to set up a local council, or dilak, of clan leaders, to which would be devolved some of the powers of the pan-regional Northern Land Council. Fierce infighting has been the upshot: the NT government first funded the dilak, then leaked against it, and now has quietly refunded it.

Clan leaders have backed Yunupingu and fought him, sometimes at the same time, as have their white advisers. The NT-based media has merrily played favourites in this game. Its effects are still playing out and regional consensus remains elusive.

How then to advance the wellbeing of an indigenous group so vulnerable to division, so plagued by social anomie and so stripped of the power effective training brings? Yunupingu and like-minded leaders, not just in the Yolngu region but across the whole of the north, have a twin strategy.

First, they want to escape the welfare trap and promote local businesses, staffed by locals. Yunupingu's demonstration project is a timber harvesting and housing construction scheme based on Gumatj land and employing 20 people. While the grandiose Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program is pouring money into the hands of external contractors, this venture is providing permanent jobs, training and shelter made from sustainable materials: the virtuous circle is clear.

The second track focuses on royalty payments for land use. The Yolngu are in an unusual position, though not a unique one, as a result of the mine on their country. Negotiations over a new royalty agreement between the clans and the mining multinational Rio Tinto Alcan are well advanced, and a completed deal should be unveiled soon after the election.

That agreement, with its substantial finance flow, will at last provide the seed capital for all Yunupingu's dreams. Indigenous groups have a generation's painful experience in what doesn't work with large-scale royalty transfer payments, and a new paradigm has been crafted. There are examples to follow: the traditional leaders on Groote Eylandt, across the strait from Gove, have limited cash payments to individuals and quarantined large streams of mining revenue to fund private education and infrastructure.

This is the type of model the Kimberley Land Council highlights in its talks over the large-scale gas hub proposal north of Broome, and it also powers Yunupingu's vision of a new educational institution. Hence this year's stringent Garma focus on schooling and the presence at the festival of the visionaries of the field. Pearson will be on hand, with evidence of initial successes in his own area's schools as they test out new direct instruction methods. Tobias Nganbe, chief local inspirer of the Da Ngamilmin educational reforms in the large NT community of Wadeye, is also attending.

Men of this stripe, reformers with experience on the ground, are the key voices. It is impossible for Yunupingu and his fellow clan leaders not to be conscious of how badly the education system in the NT has failed them. The awful enrolment figures for indigenous remote area schools can be read on the MySchool website: even those figures understate the collapse in community school performance. In the desert and the Top End, daily attendance often falls to levels below 20 per cent of the school-age population. Against this backdrop, Labor's failure to fulfil its 2007 campaign pledge and build three regional indigenous boarding facilities bites hard. (Labor this week announced it would move to build its three long-promised boarding facilities if re-elected:)

Yunupingu aims to use the region's initial royalties, the lion's share of which falls to his Gumatj clan, to rebuild Dhupuma, and longing for educational success is plain is across the region. The Tiwi Islanders secured federal funds to help them build a dedicated private college on Melville Island, while a handful of well-run remote schools in Arnhem Land have been switching to Christian systems to secure additional support.

This dream of real education stems in great part from the memory of what Dhupuma was: a campus that trained most of the leaders of today's north. It was a place with a code. Its symbols recalled the potent story cycles of the region. Yunupingu briefed an architect on plans for the new school recently: in his vision it would be a 300-pupil high school balancing and integrating two cultures: his own and the mainstream.

It would provide core rules that today's wayward young generations lack -- moral guidelines: "Don't lie or the lie will get you. Don't steal or the theft will destroy you. Don't hate or the hate will kill you."

Another guideline sits inside Yunupingu's head: he, like Pearson, accepts that collectivism has failed Aboriginal people in the bush. Pearson, in his columns in The Australian, speaks of enlightened self-interest as a means of levering remote area communities out of poverty. Yunupingu appeals to the family principle: initiative propelling family members to work for each others' benefit.

There is a strong quality of return to past paradigms in these thought patterns, and in this way the plan to remake Dhupuma as an elite college is a means of annulling a generation of shared fates and wasted schemes.

But a new direction as abrupt as this is beyond the charting scope of a single festival. Garma had become something of a trap for the Yolngu: a dry season chance for southern intellectuals to coat themselves in indigenous culture, dream of the beauty of Yolngu rituals and ignore the blatant signs of narcosis and alcoholic stupor on the streets of nearby Nhulunbuy.

Music was the festival's first life-blood, inspired by Yunupingu's beloved brother Mandawuy and his group Yothu Yindi; but Garma had also become the stage for windy debates, co-ordinated under the aegis of the far-off Charles Darwin University, with Yolngu listlessness and disengagement quite tangible.

The tone is changed. A new festival director, Rhoda Roberts, has taken the reins.

Academic talks will go ahead under Langton's guidance, with new economic and education models under scrutiny. Behind the scenes the Arnhem Land theatre impresario Andrish Saint-Clare, has brought a range of clans into a program of traditional dance performances.

In the wider nation, it is the time when the country decides its future course. And at the tip of Arnhem Land, Aboriginal leaders are doing the same, seeking to craft a degree of autonomy.

The first great challenge is in the question-setting, which Yunupingu is seeking to recalibrate: to ask not so much how to extract booty from government as to do things for themselves.

In this moist, tropical climate, in this season, there are blazing new dawns every day -- but perhaps at this year's Garma there are grounds for hoping that the glow of fresh beginnings may endure.