Foreword: Yolŋu People-Places, Languages and Philosophy

Introduction to Yolŋu People, Places, and their languages

Yolŋu people and their places have thrived for many thousands of years in the eastern region of what we now know as Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, Australia. Yolŋu speak many languages, each left in its own places as the ancestors came across the land, singing, crying, dancing and leaving behind networks of people-places, species, clouds, breezes, waterholes and rivers, ceremonies, images and ancestral songs. Each group – often referred to as a bäpurru – sings and dances its own totemic species, many of which it shares with other related groups. Every place belongs to a particular bäpurru with a particular language created by an Ancestral Being.

Everything and everyone in the Yolŋu world, including every bäpurru belongs to a moiety – either Dhuwa or Yirritja.  Dhuwa must marry Yirritja, and Yirritja must marry Dhuwa, so every Dhuwa person has a Yirritja mother, and vice versa. Dhuwa people sing and dance their own Dhuwa species, ancestors, places, totems, ceremonies etc, and Yirritja have their own. Yirritja authors in this book include Garŋgulkpuy and her father Buthimaŋ from the Wangurri bäpurru, and the book is dedicated to Birrinymal Gaykamaŋu from the Yirritja Gupapuyŋu people. Dhuwa authors include Raymattja Marika from the Rirratjiŋu bäpurru, Wapiriny Gurruwiwi from the Gälpu bäpurru, and Gawura Waṉambi from the Marraŋu people. The relationship of care and responsibility between a person’s group and their mother’s group is known as yothu-yindi. A Yolŋu mother could be an individual person, a whole clan group, an area of land, a ceremonial object, or a tree or animal, which is sung, cried, danced, painted or owned by one’s mother’s group.

Introduction to Yolŋu Philosophy

The word philosophy is derived from the ancient Greek words philos: ‘love’ and sophia ‘wisdom’. The love of wisdom, and the wisdom which Yolŋu love is that of their ancestors and all that their ancestors left behind for them: the places, the languages and their words and concepts, the songs, stories and ceremonies and daily practices, as well as that which is kept secret-sacred.

The work of Yolŋu philosophy generally entails discerning how ancestral stories of actions provide a model or an imperative for correct, appropriate or beneficial ways of behaving in the contemporary world. Every Yolŋu, in fact everything in the Yolŋu world has its own unique style of behaviour, called gakal, which must be attended to carefully. Moral formation in the Yolŋu world is the work of producing a good gakal.

Yolŋu use many ancestral traces to enliven and preserve their love of wisdom – footprints and bones, spring waters, lagoons and ashes, nests and strings, ceremonial sites and performances – all these things can be used to make agreement as to who and where we are, where we have come from, and how we should go on together.

So the work of Yolŋu philosophy is generally integrated into everyday life in everyday conversations, where resources left by the ancestors are brought up to assess the best interpretation of a situation or an event, or the best course of action.

Only occasionally do Yolŋu knowledge authorities sit down and write to make their philosophies clear – and usually this is to help non-Yolŋu learners or researchers understand the fundamentals of Yolŋu life which are so different from the fundamentals which underlie Balanda (whitefella) thinking and ways of living. Understanding these fundamentals is critical to Yolŋu and Balanda working together productively and diplomatically in order not to undermine either Yolŋu or Balanda’s thinking or philosophy.

The papers in this volume have been collected over many years from Yolŋu who have shared their philosophies as they led teaching or research activities in the Yolŋu Studies Department at Charles Darwin University since the mid-1990s.