Naku Dharuk: The bark petitions by Clare Wright

Naku Dharuk is the third book in Clare Wright’s Democracy Trilogy which began with the rebels of Eureka and their struggle for rights and liberties, then moved to the women’s suffrage movement, and now presents the story of the Yolngu people of northeast Arnhem Land and their campaign for recognition of their sovereign rights. Thus we have the Eureka flag, the Women’s Suffrage Banner, and then the Bark Petitions, three founding documents in Australia’s path to democracy. Wright sums it up: 'Flag. Banner. Bark.' Three key moments in our nation’s history.

Clare Wright had the fortuitous opportunity to live with Yolngu on their land, mix with families, learn the language, and then gradually piece together an important story gleaned both from a Yolngu perspective and through the meticulous researching of diaries and papers. It is the story of a sovereign nation well used to trading with other nations: the trade with the Makassans for trepang, with the Methodist missionaries, and even with mining prospectors, there had always been a history of fair and respectful exchange. It never occurred to the Yolngu that some other power had assumed the rights to their country. Only when an unknown person pegged out lines through their peanut farm alongside the Methodist mission, that they started to query ‘Who wants this?’, little knowing that a distant federal government had excised a large portion of their country and granted mining licences to a French company for mining bauxite, without any consultation or any consideration of the people who lived there.

The Bark Petitions created by Yolngu artists with an accompanying message typed by the wife of the mission superintendent, sent to key people in the Australian government, was not a complaint about mining as such, it was about the reasonable expectation of consultation over the allocation of rights, and compensation for what they were prepared to give up. It was a call for recognition of an existing nation with its own laws and governance, and set the path for discarding the 'terra nullius' myth and ultimately recognising an indigenous people and their existing land rights.

Wright describes the hand of diplomacy extended by the people of Yirrkala, masters of cross-cultural collaboration, as a precursor to the Uluru Statement from the Heart, a respectful invitation to walk together, something that even today Australians struggle with.

Subtitled ‘How the people of Yirrkala changed the course of Australian democracy’, Clare Wright’s book is long, over 600 pages, but is very readable. Ted Egan asserts that it should become ‘standard reading material for all secondary students’. Most would know about the Eureka Stockade and the women’s rights campaign, but far fewer know about Naku Dharuk, the Bark Petitions, two copies held in Parliament House, one held by the National Museum of Australia, and the fourth, a treasure, miraculously rediscovered in the process of writing the book, and returned to the Yolngu people.

For fascinating interviews and reviews, see the Text Publishing website. Then add the book to your school library.

Themes: Australian democracy, Yolngu people, Aboriginal rights, Sovereignty, Methodist mission.

Helen Eddy