Writing in the Sand

Prologue

On a lonely patch of the northern Australian coastline, a sweet, sad ceremony is getting underway. It’s 7 June 2018. The smell of burnt eucalyptus and the smoke of a slow-roasting barbecue carry on the dry season breeze. A makeshift stage has been trucked into the remote Gumatj homeland, 130 kilometres down a potholed dirt highway from the nearest township of Nhulunbuy, on which a sweaty crew tune guitars and test amps beneath the brutal glow of the East Arnhem Land sun. A posse of scrappy camp dogs watch curiously as guests climb out of their packed 4WDs and filter into the site. A soundie sorts the speakers and a distinctive guitar groove blasts out. The vocals carry over the grounds:

Well I heard it on the radio,

And I saw it on the television . . .

It was out here at Biranybirany, between beers and by the flames of an open campfire, that the first snatches of the Yothu Yindi song ‘Treaty’ were hashed out in 1990. A spark lit that would eventually spread into a wildfire. The early embers of a game-changing political anthem, with a chorus that was never meant to make it out of the rehearsal room. An ARIA Song of the Year and its video clip – remember those kids backflipping on the beach? – that opened the eyes of a generation. The Biranybirany speakers blare:

Treaty yeah! Treaty now!

A couple of the (eight!) credited songwriters on ‘Treaty’ are reunited here for this sombre occasion. Its lead author is physically absent, gone from this world, but his spirit blazes strong in the hearts of those congregated. On this morning, they’re here for him: it’s a memorial, out at the birthplace of his biggest hit, to mark five years since he passed away. Mats are splayed on the dust under a hodgepodge of marquees set up in a ring around the central ceremonial arena. The guests shuffle in, sitting to await the day’s proceedings. Among these visitors is a famous musician, keeping low-key among the crowd. He stands with his hands behind his back like a polite schoolboy.

Suddenly, the dull murmur of the crowd is broken by the reverberating clack of two pieces of wood being knocked together in a driving beat – tock tock tock – and the purposeful holler of a sort-of marching band leader revving up a procession. This leader is Witiyana Marika, the charismatic co-founder of Yothu Yindi. Between a frizzy mane of black hair and a blooming grey beard, his coffee-dark face resembles a lion as it concentratedly prepares for a hunt. He’s at the head of a pack of around thirty painted warriors, both Yolŋu and balanda, black and white, all men. Biḻma (clapsticks) clasped in his hands, Witiyana cracks them together in time, an ancient metronome ringing out. He begins the manikay (song). He’s singing out ‘Maralitja’ (‘Crocodile Man’), a Yothu Yindi track about the late frontman’s Gumatj clan identity. Witiyana steers the troupe towards the large sandpit that’s been deposited in front of the stage, at the heart of this open bush auditorium. The famous musician in the audience is suddenly summoned from across the pit by Witiyana.

‘Paul Kelly!’ shouts the Yothu Yindi songman. ‘Yow, Paul Kelly!’

Out in the wilds of East Arnhem Land, in this tiny blip on the map, the renowned Australian singer is called into action. Paul Kelly takes a few steps forward as Witiyana guides him into the procession. In a flash, this otherwise inconspicuous figure, a stark contrast in his blue polo to the painted men surrounding him, is at the centre of the march as it moves across the sand. It’s headed towards a large boulder draped in yellow fabric by the stage.

Witiyana instructs Kelly with earnest glances and hand signals. The southern musician offers a gracious smile, which is quickly abandoned as he absorbs the seriousness of the impending moment. The warriors stop just steps before the boulder.

Witiyana’s chants have hit an urgent climax and now sing out alone and acapella across the ceremonial grounds. Still bellowing, he takes Kelly’s arm and guides it onto the boulder, to the sheet of yellow fabric. Kelly has evidently grasped his role and stretches out his hand to remove the sheet. For a second, his otherwise passive face is marked by sorrow. The boulder has been bared for all to see. The warriors stand still; a sea of furrowed brows staring at this rock. On the stone lies a plaque bearing the words:

My tongue is the flame, gathered, prepared and alight.

It burns with truth carrying me across the land

of my backbone.

Dr Mandawuy Bakamana Djambayaŋ

Djarrtuṉdjuṉ Yunupiŋu AC,

September 17 1956 – June 2 2013.

A photograph sits at the plaque’s centre – a wide smiling face rounded by crow-black curls, a face once recognised across the nation. It’s Mandawuy Yunupiŋu. Gumatj songman, school principal. The charming Yothu Yindi band leader who burst from the NT wilderness to become one of the most famous Aboriginal men in the country.

He was a man of many names. His surname, Yunupiŋu, means ‘a rock that stands against time’. He was a man of fire; in his own words: ‘fire is my clan symbol. Fire is my life force.’ With Yothu Yindi he once took that fire – that rock-and-roll torch – around the entire world, spreading a message of equality, of working together, of the power of the Yolŋu voice.

The bäru was his totem animal, the spirit of his ancestors, dancing deep within his soul. He was a crocodile man of the Gumatj clan and this hamlet of Biranybirany was his homeland.

On this day in 2018, the sun beams down, but an undercurrent of grief runs cool in the crowd. Paul Kelly wipes a speck from his eye and Witiyana grasps him around the shoulder in solidarity as the warriors stand gazing at the plaque, heads bowed. Then, in a sudden flurry, like a tide returning out to sea after the crash of a towering wave, the procession is over. The warriors dissipate and grab a seat in the sand, awaiting the next part of proceedings.

The musicians make their way up to the stage.

1

Diamond Dogs

Yirrkala, 1976: an almighty din was clanging out from the old school hall. Although rough, it was still recognisable as the gravelly howl of John Fogerty and distorted strains of his rock outfit Creedence Clearwater Revival. Grinding guitar lines rolled heavy and fast like a road train clanking up the neck of the Stuart Highway. Minimal chords, three or four, max. Songs about the rain, the ceaseless rain. As the singer’s voice climbed to the climax of ‘Who’ll Stop the Rain’, the monsoon was keeping rhythm against the hall’s roof. But the deluge couldn’t dissuade a stream of kids from poking their noses in through the door to see what was going on, to have a giggle and yell with glee.

It would turn out to be the first gig of a local cover band. Modelled by a group of brothers on their faraway heroes of the stage and spotlight, and an early precursor to Yothu Yindi, the band was called the Diamond Dogs. Jangly guitars, crackly amps, raw as a plate of buffalo tartare.

‘We started belting out songs; people came saying, Ay, what’s that noise? Must be something!’ says Djawa Yunupiŋu, once the Diamond Dogs’ lead singer, between belly laughs. ‘Kids comin’ up, and we were busy singin’ out our songs from Creedence Clearwater, Rolling Stones, Beatles, and Elvis of course – the king of rock and roll.’

The band’s name was a nod to the David Bowie album, whose title also had a local resonance: the diamond was a shining symbol of the Yunupiŋu brothers’ Gumatj clan. ‘The idea ’round that, around David Bowie’s album, struck me,’ says Djawa. ‘My totem is the dog. It’s my Dreaming. And the diamond is me, my clan. I twisted David Bowie’s name round, to me, to my clan. And my brother said, That’s good! Let’s stick to that.’

Djawa’s in his sixties now, lean and affable, with his top foliage turning silver. He’s the younger brother of two former Australians of the Year – Galarrwuy and Mandawuy (previously Bakamana) Yunupiŋu. One is nowadays an elderly land rights legend; the other was the original lead singer of Yothu Yindi.

But when the Dogs formed, they were just young men, teenagers, sniffing out new songs. ‘I’d just come back from Kormilda College, before that big wind came, Cyclone Tracy,’ says Djawa. ‘I’d come back for a Christmas break, and with me I’d brought some songbooks. Brought some records with me too . . . my brother already had a guitar with him, he bought one in Darwin. We had one amp, we shared the amp, and a rhythm guitar. We were on the lookout for a bass guitar – they were pretty hard to find in those days. But there was a spare bass in the church, so we decided to ask the parish there if we could use it. And they said, Look, go, you can take it. We don’t need it. That was very generous of them. So, we started practising, practising.’

There the Dogs were born. Their main line-up consisted of three teen brothers born from different mothers – Djawa, Bakamana and Balupalu Yunupiŋu, with their mates Harry Gumana on bass and Mawalan 2 Marika on guitar, and a revolving door of drummers slapping the skins.

Their base was the Yolŋu community of Yirrkala, a former missionary settlement that lies against the stingray-laced shores of the Arafura Sea. It was the birthplace in 1963 of the fight for Aboriginal land rights, after the Australian Government gave an international mining consortium the green light to dig up Yolŋu traditional lands for bauxite, without consultation. It was the trigger for a drawn-out legal and political battle, in which the brothers’ father, the powerful Gumatj chieftain and artist Mungurrawuy Yunupiŋu, was a pivotal player, and eldest brother Galarrwuy also had an important role.

In Yirrkala, millennia-old sacred song cycles and ceremonies run parallel to a rock-and-roll beat; the traditional ways of the elders are in an endless tug-of-war with the gleaming lures of the white man’s world. It’s a place of balance, precarious as that may be at times.

Here, the Dogs would gather their cheap equipment of chapped guitars and frayed drumsticks and bash away long into the night. It was modern rock thrashed out in an ancient corner of north-east Arnhem Land where Yolŋu society – complete with its own traditional law, education, politics, maths, music, art, astronomy, dance, real estate and supermarket – has operated cohesively for thousands of years.

In a Yirrkala backyard, a tarp is spread out on the grass, sun beating down. A toddler just learning to stand hops, shaky but fearless, around the yard in a nappy. Yalmay Yunupiŋu leans back on the plastic, stretching as if trying to reach deep for a memory, always keeping one eye locked on the baby as he toddles off to try to wreak havoc. Her late husband was Mandawuy Yunupiŋu, known prior to the late 1980s as Bakamana Yunupiŋu (among other names, including Tom). Now, the steadfast mother of their six daughters (and a growing number of grandchildren and great grandchildren) is taking time to preserve and record old memories.

‘The first band that he started before we got married was Diamond Dogs,’ says Yalmay. The memory sparks a burst of laughter. ‘It didn’t go anywhere. It wasn’t that big. They played down at the oval, where the basketball court is. I still have fond memories of that, where they played some of their first Diamond Dogs gigs.’ She talks of how music was in her husband’s blood. It had been swirling around the Yunupiŋu brothers since their earliest days of childhood. ‘Music lived in him because of traditional music that he had already.’

The brothers’ father, Mungurrawuy, was a traditional Gumatj composer. He’d also owned the first ever wind-up gramophone in Yirrkala and had an enviable collection of vinyl, particularly of old tribal recordings. His sons would study intently this strange musical object, its tuba-like protuberance blurting out sounds as crackly records spun round and round. Over his lifetime, the bearded Mungurrawuy also fathered a mighty brood; according to his son Djawa, the clan leader had about eight wives who collectively contributed more than fifteen children to the proud Yunupiŋu lineage.

Now also a clan elder himself, Balupalu Yunupiŋu – another original Diamond Dog – sits at the Gove Boat Club overlooking the waters of Melville Bay, just a few kilometres from his community at Gunyaŋara (Ski Beach). With a stubble of beard showing on his usually clean-shaven cheeks, he’s reminiscing about the roughshod outfit he and his brothers pulled together all those years ago, inspired in part by the sounds of their father’s old gramophone. ‘He was the first one to get one of those. And we used to listen to that. We used to carry it everywhere, my brothers, and listen to that,’ says Balupalu, sipping on a beer and chuckling. ‘It was mainly the old songs – Yolŋu songs – like on the land and all that. We would’ve been teenage, thirteen or fourteen.’

As a natural progression, the boys started to hunt around for instruments, so they could play the sounds themselves. ‘We decided to ask our older brother [Galarrwuy] to get us some band equipment and we started singing,’ says Balupalu. ‘Started off with Creedence; we loved the Creedence. I got really excited. My brother [Bakamana] went into Darwin, went everywhere, and collected all the old tapes, like Status Quo, Joe Cocker and some other music as well. He’d bring it back and he’d play it for us, and we liked it.’

The siblings had paid attention when a 21-year-old Galarrwuy had had a shot at the music business years earlier, recording a land-rights-inspired single with bush balladeer Ted Egan in 1969, called the ‘Gurindji Blues’. They were still in school when the single was released on vinyl, but it showed them what was possible, and so, with Galarrwuy’s help gathering some gear, they fired up.

The band’s focus at that stage was only on covers. Bakamana ‘hadn’t ever thought about writing his own songs yet,’ says Balupalu, about the man whose lyrics and tunes would one day alter the global perception of Australian music. ‘We started up a different kind of music back then, all ŋapaki [non-Indigenous] music.’

Despite their amateur stylings and dodgy equipment, the Diamond Dogs had a good run. They were booked for gigs at the nearby Walkabout tavern, and travelled out for shows in other East Arnhem communities such as Galiwin’ku and Milingimbi. When talking about her husband’s first foray into the universe of rock and roll, Yalmay Yunupiŋu peals with laughter, an infectious high-pitched chortle. ‘They were pretty rough at the time,’ she offers. ‘Very rough boys at the time.’

Like a shooting star, the group burned out just as it was heating up. ‘We lost our gear,’ shrugs Balupalu. It was over, but not without some positive – albeit discordant – notes having been hit along the way. The imported songs of the Diamond Dogs had started Bakamana’s rock-and-roll heart beating.

At this stage, however, playing in a band was very much a side hustle for Bakamana; his main calling was education, and he worked as a teacher’s assistant at the Yirrkala School.

Bakamana had grown up in a row of houses so close to the sea that the front doorsteps were almost lapped by the incoming tide. It’s a place named Raŋi, in Rirratjiŋu language, and goes by Beach Camp in English. From here you can watch the wet season storms cross the horizon, a wall of rain marching towards Yirrkala. Of an evening, an old man named Bälun would position himself by the campfire, serenading the kids with Slim Dusty songs on an old acoustic. Bakamana would perch beside the old man, soaking in the country ballads before Bälun’s crooning was sucked away by the westerly winds.

Land rights legend and Gumatj clan leader Galarrwuy Yunupiŋu, pictured here in his youth, was a big influence on his younger brothers, including Yothu Yindi’s lead singer. (Fairfax Media Archives)

Another of those kids raised up in Raŋi was Dr B Marika – an elder, artist and the NT’s Senior Australian of the Year in 2020. (Dr Marika sadly passed away, aged sixty-six, in July 2021, just as this book was going to press.) ‘Bälun had taught himself how to play string guitars, and Bakamana would sit with him,’ says Dr Marika. ‘He was the first teacher that he had for playing musical instruments.’ Steaming cuppa in hand, she peers out to sea from her home at Raŋi, and thinks back to a largely untroubled childhood. ‘We all grew up in Raŋi, our old people living here, his parents, my parents, cousins, yothu yindi: family. Gumatj and Rirratjiŋu. We lived in corrugated iron houses, nothing like you see today.’ Dr Marika motions to the surrounding scene. ‘A sand bed and a couple of blankets. Our showers were the creek. We’d shower in there and then go off to the mission school, bare feet, hardly anything on our backs. We literally grew up together, along with his wife, my sister Yalmay. I didn’t see any hardships when we were growing up as children – well, obviously there were health issues. But our parents were still nomads.’

Their families were trying to buck the encroachment of western culture and carry on with their traditional lifestyle – hunting, gathering, walking the country or travelling the coastline in their lipalipa (canoes). Across Yirrkala, music was a pervading presence, woven in with the sea, the wind and the nightly beach bonfires. The elders would sing ceremonial manikay – songlines dating back thousands of years to mark animals, rocks, trees and ancestors – to the earthy drone of the yiḏaki (didgeridoo) and the clacking of the biḻma. Thrown into the pot with the traditional sounds were the hymns of the Christian church, which Bakamana and his peers learned at mission school during the day, and the more contemporary strains of country music, which came crackling through a couple of portable wirelesses.

At school, the students learned ‘typical European manikay’ like ‘Edelweiss’ from The Sound of Music, a song named after a white flower found high in the Swiss Alps. Dr Marika recalls the children loading into a bus for a school excursion to visit the nearby early mining developments, where on the way they sang in harmony to American troubadour Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land Is Your Land’. A song that speaks of the freedom of all folk sharing the different corners of a wide country, it seems an ironic choice by the mission school educators, considering the land rights battle being waged between the Yolŋu and the mining company at that time.

In the hall of the mission school, the students would refine their harmonies in choir practice. The boys and girls were being readied for an annual competition that saw hundreds of Aboriginal kids from remote communities gather in the Territory capital each year. It was called the North Australia Eisteddfod: a festival of music and dance, which tallied among its early winners a talented teenage Yolŋu dancer named David Gulpilil, who would become a renowned Australian actor and star of films such as Storm Boy and The Tracker. Dr Marika recalls: ‘We learned at home and practised our singing and all of that, then we used to get carted over to Darwin for the big Eisteddfod festivals and competed with other Yolŋu communities. I’m sure we won one or two recognitions.’

Another girl from those mission school days was Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, now the principal of Yirrkala School. She recalls Bakamana as a class showman with a show-stopping smile, who would have his fellow pupils in stitches. At the school, the missionaries called him by his English name, Tom, and his best friend was Jerry – a real cat-and-mouse team. ‘There goes Tom and Jerry! we would all say.’ Merrkiyawuy cracks up at the memory. ‘And they were funny. Really funny. And they would make us all laugh. We were all growing up together in a big family.’

She recalls pattering into a teacher’s house years later and witnessing the Diamond Dogs in full churn. It was the first time she’d ever heard her schoolmate sing. ‘I remember going there just once and listening to them singing and practising, and saying, "Ay manikay, ay latju [beautiful]!" Just encouraging them. It was all my uncles at the beginning.’

Yalmay and Bakamana had been schoolmates too, and in 1979 they were married in the ‘tribal way’. Yalmay says, ‘It wasn’t like a marriage in the white way, in a church. It was just small, with immediate family. His family came to where I lived and we had a meeting. There it was agreed we would be married. And I packed up my things and went to his home.’

There’s one story from her husband’s Diamond Dogs days that brings tears to Yalmay’s eyes, an incident that could’ve altered her own trajectory, and that of Australia’s pop music scene, for the worse. ‘I would watch my kids and also my grandkids, and I would think back to this story, and I would think to myself, These kids wouldn’t be here, and I wouldn’t have married him, and I wouldn’t have had grandkids,’ she says, eyeing her tiny grandson as she speaks.

Bakamana’s niece, Banbapuy Ganambarr, remembers the night well, as Bakamana spent it with her late husband, Billy Gaywndji Maymuru. She tells the tale as Yalmay listens on. ‘They were really great mates. Always drinking together, always driving to town, always hitchhiking together,’ says Banbapuy. ‘And in those days we only had a handful of cars in Yirrkala, and sometimes people used to go by boats. They’d launch from where Raŋi is, around the point, and then park their boats on the seashore at Nhulunbuy, at Town Beach. Then they’d go and drink, and come back on the boat.’

Bakamana had turned up at his niece’s family home. He strummed the JJ Cale song ‘Magnolia’ to her toddler son on guitar, then soon enough, he and Billy were on their way. They made tracks down towards the shoreline. ‘I saw them walking around down to the beach, and I said, Aren’t you hitchhiking? And they said, No, we’ve got a boat parked down at the beach.’

Their tinnie puttered off, until it was just a silhouette on the horizon. It’s about a fifteen-kilometre trip by sea, skirting rocky coastline, from Yirrkala to the nearby mining town of Nhulunbuy.

The hours ticked onwards. The pair didn’t return. ‘I was worried because I knew something was wrong. And I kept getting up, waking up and waiting for them outside,’ Banbapuy recounts.

She later learned her instincts had been correct: something had gone awry when they were halfway back to Yirrkala. ‘They were having a party, they were drinking in the boat, singing and singing and singing, and then my husband turned around and saw that my uncle was gone. And the moon was not up, there was no moon, it was a dark night. And [Billy] straight away knew that [Bakamana had] fallen off the boat. So, he took off his shirt and dived in, and started going like this’ – she gesticulates to show his arms moving wildly, here and there – ‘He was sinking.’ Billy miraculously landed a hand upon Bakamana’s shirt and hoisted him back up onto the boat.

‘When they came home they were all wet,’ Banbapuy says. ‘And I said, What happened? And they said, Uncle here, he fell asleep.’

That event sometimes flickers through her mind, she says, and she quietly offers thanks to her deceased first husband for saving Bakamana’s life. ‘I thank him and say, Thank you for saving my uncle’s life, otherwise he wouldn’t have been famous, and no Yothu Yindi would’ve existed.’

By 1984, with the Diamond Dogs exiled to history, the Yunupiŋu brothers had a new group on the go, the Wäwa Mala (‘Group of Brothers’) band. For this band, Bakamana had joined forces with a balanda janitor from Yirrkala School, a musician named Graeme Kelly, who’d spent years travelling through Asia and the Pacific. ‘We met each other and caught up and just hit it off, and started jamming and playing music, mostly just guitars and stuff, but talkin’ about this mix of traditional and modern music and putting it both together,’ says Kelly, now seventy and living in Tasmania. ‘We both had very similar ideas. And so, we just spent a lot of time together, talkin’ about it and jamming and writing a song here and there, and going to play it, and then sort of coming up with ideas about that. It was a good, positive start.’

On his journeys through the Solomon Islands and New Guinea, Kelly says, he’d seen groups merge their traditional sounds with electric instruments. It was a new idea for Arnhem Land. The Wäwa Mala band started to incorporate some of the elements that would eventually become the backbone of Yothu Yindi – the yiḏaki and buŋgul (traditional dance).

‘I think it was an important time to get