Garma Festival 1999
The Garma Festival of Traditional Culture and the Yidaki Master Class will be held in Arnhem Land Aug August 6-9, 2004. This an opportunity to have a cultural immersion experience beyond your richest dreams.
For information on how you can attend Garma 2004 and registration e-mail garma@yirdaki.org
It is only since 1935 that the Yolngu people of the region have had sustained contact with the Balanda (Europeans), firstly through Methodist missions, then through contact with service personnel during World War Two and, more recently, with theimposition of multi-national mines on their tribal lands.Yolngu people speak a dozen dialects of a language group known as Yolngu matha. English is very much a second (or thirteenth) language. Since the 1960s Yolngu leaders have been conspicuous in the struggle for Aboriginal land rights.
In 1963, provoked by a unilateral government decision to excise a part of their land for a bauxite mine, Yolngu people at Yirrkala in north eastArnhem land sent to the House of Representatives a petition on bark (the traditional medium for visual art representation). The bark petition attracted national and international attention and now hangs in the national parliament as a testament tothe Yolngu role in the birth of the land rights movement.Yolngu artists and performers have been at the forefront of global recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture. Yolngu artists, renowned for their fine cross-hatching paintings on bark have international reputations and Yolngu traditional dancers and musicians have performed widely throughout the world and had profound influence on contemporary performance troupes. Yothu Yindi, the band, are Australia's most successful and widely recognised contemporary Indigenous music group.
Yirritja Clan Groups:
Gumatj, Gupapuyngu, Wangurri, Ritharrngu, Mangalili, Munyuku, Madarrpa, Warramiri, Dhalwangu, Liyalanmirri
Dhuwa Clan Groups: Rirratjingu, Galpu, Djambarrpuyngu, Golumala, Marrakulu, Marrangu, Djapu, Datiwuy, Ngaymil, Djarrwark
Workshops will be held in the mornings and afternoons, with the bunggul (dancing) in the early evenings.
The program will also include educational workshops exploring Yolngu approaches to health, bush medicine, land management, bilingual education, eco tourism and women's business, conducted by representatives from the Yirrkala Community Education Centre, Dhimurru Land Management, and the Northern Territory University's Centre for Indigenous Natural and Cultural Resource Management (CINCRM), and Faculty of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (FATSIS).
Previous workshops have explored fire management, Yolngu knowledge on-line, intellectual copyright, bilingual education and turtle and marine management.
Workshops and field trips will include the collection of pandanus and other bush materials for the weaving of ceremonial baskets, mats and dilly bags; the collection and use of bush medicine; the collection and use of bush tucker and the collection of traditional ochres and dyes for painting Nuku Dhulang (bark paintings using traditional ochres painted with a brush made of human hair).
Each clan group has song and dance specific to their country, but which is related to each other clan groups ceremonial practice in a range of cultural manifestations which include the painting of totems and other sacred objects and the performance of related traditional song and dance
An innovation for Garma 2000 will be the narration provided by elders and cultural interpreters. This will provide a unique experience for visitors who will hear descriptions of ceremonies that have been performed by Yolngu clan groups for almost 40,000 years. These descriptions will be supplemented by creation stories about the area - including that of the spirit man Ganbulabula who, among other things, brought forth the yidaki among the Gumatj people.
The residential nature of the festival will provide opportunities for visitors to visit the camp-sites of the various clans to spend time with family groups sharing stories and learning about aspects of lore, tradition and culture.
CHIPS MACKINOLTY at a festival where there were plenty of stars but no razzmatazz.
Mandawuy Yunupingu, lead singer in the Yothu Yindi band and an organiser of north-east Arnhem Land's Garma Festival of Traditional Culture, summed it up: "Sydney ga Melbourne - barrku! Garma dhiyala bayma Gulkula!"
Although the hundreds of non-Aboriginal people who attended would not have understood Mandawuy's language, it was a sentiment they shared: "Sydney and Melbourne eat your heart out, Garma at Gulkula is where the real festival is!"
In part it was the venue. The festival site last week was at a place called Gulkula: a clearing in a stringybark forest strung along the edge of an escarpment, facing south-east towards the Gulf of Carpentaria; the atmosphere of eucalypt smoke from scores of campfires and sleeping under the stars; and waking to the clear, intense light of a dry season day and the sounds of clap sticks and didgeridoos.
But what distinguished it from activities elsewhere in Australia were the ways in which Garma succeeded in redefining the idea of what a festival might be: a combination of religious ritual observances and cultural celebrations; a mix of teaching and learning of indigenous knowledge systems; a melange of political proselytisation and philosophic discourse.
In fact the word "festival" is a poor description for the events of the week. Garma is the name given to an important ceremony belonging to the Yolngu people of north-east Arnhem Land. It is a form of open ceremony embodying unity, harmonisation and balance: in the words of Mandawuy's elder brother and Gumatj leader, Galarrwuy, "a way of exploring our common humanity" through working together to create a sense of shared purpose, to cement relationships and reconcile differences.
The Garma ceremony was at the core of the week's events. Under the gaze of a six-metre high carving of the Ganbulabula ancestor spirit, members of the Gumatj, Rirratjingu, Warramirri, Ritharrngu, Wanggurri and Dhalwangu clans from the local region, joined by the Bunungku and Waraihngu peoples 300 kilometres to the west, joined forces late each afternoon in dazzling performances of the dances of their peoples.
The Garma culminated on the last day with the enactment of Larrakitjko Garama, a mortuary ceremony, which involved five groups who had spent the week painting their clan designs on a three-metre log coffin which, accompanied by 50 dancers, was raised on a platform facing Ganbulabula. The event was both a re-enactment of the Wangarr, or Dreaming story, that is commemorated by the Gulkula site; but also an affirmation to those present - Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal - of the continuing need for positive acts of reconciliation between peoples.
This was affirmed at the close of the ceremony, with the enactment of a ritual gift exchange - mardawarra - between the Gumatj hosts and their Bunungku and Waraihngu visitors from the west inviting them and other groups back for next year's festival.
But this was not mere colour and movement for the tourist trade: few outsiders would have experienced such performances. The Kalawan dance of the Waraihngu and Bungku, for example, had not been danced since the death of one of its exponents some years ago. The dances also occurred in the broader context of the Yolngu peoples of the region. Each day of the Garma festival featured a "bush university" of forums and classes on traditional Yolngu knowledge about the land and environment of their traditional estates, covering issues such as Yolngu languages, land management, ethnobotany and indigenous intellectual property rights.
There was also an active engagement with the artists of the region, with hands-on experiences with painters, sculptors and fibre artists. Eight people - mostly from the US and Europe - had been invited to attend yidaki (didgeridoo) master classes under Galpu elder, Djalu Gurruwiwi. Again, this was not for casual ethnographic thrill-seekers. Apart from the intensity of the week's classes, not to mention the $1,000 price tag, it also involved a wide-ranging public forum led by Mandawuy Yunupingu, Warumpi's George Rurrurrambu, Djalu Gurruwiwi and Professor Marcia Langton on the globalisation and commercialisation of the yidaki, and the potential threats to Yolngu culture as its use has spread far beyond the lands of its origin in northern Australia.
The yidaki students - somewhat chastened by the experience - were explicitly directed by the Yolngu to take back to their homelands the task of developing an ethical relationship with the traditional owners and exponents of the yidaki.
Demonstrating the continuity of Yolngu culture, the final day of the Garma festival saw the opening of the Yirrnga Music Development Centre at Guyangara, 40 kilometres to the north of Gulkula. Part of a 15-year project, which has seen the rise and rise of the Yothu Yindi band as one of Australia's great cultural exports, the Yirrnga complex has to be one of the most exotically situated music studios in the world.
Facing the sun setting across Melville Bay, the Ian Potter Studio will be home not just to Yothu Yindi, but to the growing army of Yolngu musical groups working across Australia's Top End. Backed by Mushroom Records, which has promised two commercial releases a year from the Yirrnga over the next three years, the studio was launched with a major concert featuring George Rurrurrambu, Galiwin'ku's Salt Water Band and the official launch of Yothu Yindi's latest - One Blood.
It's impossible, of course, to imagine Garma occurring in any other setting. At its heart was the relationship of the festival hosts - the Gumatj and other clans of north-east Arnhem Land - with the traditional lands handed down to them by the ancestors over many millennia. In debates over the place of Aboriginal culture within the broader Australian polity, much has been said about its "value" to the nation, largely over the amount of money it earns the national accounts and its position in "marketing" Australia to the rest of the world.
Last week's Garma festival recasts that debate. If the core of the Garma ceremony is about harmonisation and reconciliation, it is an approach to these issues that is defined by indigenous people - not decontextualised and imposed from the outside.
That was the strength of Garma. It is proposed that the festival become an annual event, but will not be part of the razzmatazz of "bigger and better" that so many city festivals fall prey to. It will be on Yolngu terms. And how can "the best" get any better?
The Garma Festival of Traditional Culture, which was attended by 200 Balanda (non indigenous) guests plus members of the local mining community at Nhulunbuy, was designed to encourage the practice, preservation and maintenance of traditional dance (bunggul), song (manikay), art and ceremony. It was organised by the Yothu Yindi Foundation.
In his welcoming address, YYF Chairman Galarrwuy Yunupingu said: "This festival is an important stage in our history. We are calling on the intellectual, artistic and cultural leaders of the nation to sit down with us to participate in our ceremony and to learn together.
"We make this call in goodwill and good faith so that Aboriginal and non Aboriginal people can learn from each other, live together and create the kind of society our ancestors have passed on to us.
"We hope to see on this site an institution of culture and learning that will be an example to all Australians".
Set in a stringybark forest with views to the Gulf of Carpentaria, the site at Gulkula has profound meanings in the Yolngu political and moral economy. One of these is expressed in the metaphor of honey. Gulkula is a nexus, a beehive where distilled and rich meanings are generated.
At the centre of the site was an oval cleared of trees, parts of it laid with a strip of sand for bunggul involving manikay (song and dancing) which happened late each afternoon with clans flying in from hundreds of kilometres away to participate.
At the foot of the bunggul ground was a six metre tall carving of the legendary Ganbulabula whose superhuman feats are celebrated at the site. A string of bough shelters on the edge of the bunggul ground was used for daily workshops in aspects of traditional culture.
A Yidaki (didjeridu) Masterclass was conducted by Djalu Gurruwiwi, an elder of the Galpu clan and a respected player, maker and promoter of the yidaki and its history, values and cultural importance. It was attended by ten European, American and Japanese students who'd flown in for the occasion. They were tutored in traditional Yolngu playing techniques and provided with a philosophical and culturally appropriate framework for the production, distribution, promotion and use of the instrument by both indigenous and non-indigenous communities.
Other bough shelters and shady trees set the scene for visual arts workshops conducted by Gulumbu Mununggurr, Dhuwarrwarr Marika, Ngalawurr Mununggurr and Gurrwun Marika Yunupingu, accomplished artists from Yirrkala. Throughout the week women worked on bark paintings and the weaving of ceremonial dilly bags and mats.
In another shelter male artists and songmen from the various clans gathered to paint ritual designs on a log coffin accompanied by yidaki and bilma (clapsticks), the artist applying the fine brush strokes for the particular cross-hatching that defines each clan's connection to land and life. The log coffin, which represented the Garma or sacred knowledge of the area, was erected on the site as part of the closing ceremony.
In a tent in the scrub, distinguished academics who've forged close links with the Yolngu gave audio-visual presentations marrying traditional and contemporary knowledge systems in finding solutions to local land and sea management issues.
The dining area was the site for workshops in Yolngu matha (language) and a ground-breaking forum on the Yidaki and culturally appropriate uses of the instrument.
Elsewhere, Yolngu women conducted excursions gathering bush tucker and vegetable dyes for the weaving classes.
Forty kilometres away at Gunyangara on Melville Bay, contemporary music workshops were being conducted in the new Yirrnga Music Development Centre. The Music Centre is Stage One in the construction of the Yothu Yindi Foundation's Garma Cultural Studies Institute. It is a stingray-shaped building nestled into the cove that incorporates The Ian Potter Foundation playing and rehearsal studio.
The workshops involved Yirrkala's East Journey and Galiwin'ku's Saltwater Band and were conducted by hometown heroes Yothu Yindi and visiting musicians including Paul Kelly and Andrew Farriss (INXS) who helped to arrange and record songs.
The festival concluded with the official opening of the Yirrnga Music Development Centre and a showcase concert to celebrate the launch of Yothu Yindi's fifth album 'One Blood'.
The Garma Festival of Traditional Culture will be held in Arnhem Land August 6-9, 2004. To register for the Garma Festival and the Yidaki Master Class e-mail yidakimasterclass@yirdaki.org
