The Yolngu people have been unwavering in their fight for their country and their culture. The Yirrkala bark petitions tell a key part of that storyGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastThree years ago, at her home in the small town of Derby in Western Australia’s Kimberley region, 92-year-old Joan McKie received a strange phone call.“Hello,” the caller began. “Do you have a bark petition?”Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email Continue reading…The Yolngu people have been unwavering in their fight for their country and their culture. The Yirrkala bark petitions tell a key part of that storyGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastThree years ago, at her home in the small town of Derby in Western Australia’s Kimberley region, 92-year-old Joan McKie received a strange phone call.“Hello,” the caller began. “Do you have a bark petition?”Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email Continue reading…
Three years ago, at her home in the small town of Derby in Western Australia’s Kimberley region, 92-year-old Joan McKie received a strange phone call.
“Hello,” the caller began. “Do you have a bark petition?”
McKie replied: “Oh yes, I’m sitting here looking at it right now – it’s on the wall in front of me.”
On the other end of the line, historian Clare Wright’s heart was racing.
The phone call was the culmination of a decades-long search for an artefact that represented a pivotal moment in Australia’s political history.
It was one of four documents known as the Yirrkala bark petitions.
The story behind them, and the long fight for Aboriginal rights they helped spark, is the subject of a new film, One Mind, One Heart,from writer and director Larissa Behrendt.
The petitions date back to the 1960s, when the Yolngu people discovered the federal government had excised 36,000 hectares of their country near Yirrkala on the north-eastern tip of the Northern Territory for bauxite mining.
Angered by the lack of consultation, in August 1963 the Yolngu people drafted a petition in two languages, English and Gumatj, asking the government to appoint a committee to hear their concerns before proceeding with mining development.
“The land in question has been hunting and food gathering land for the Yirrkala tribes from time immemorial,” they wrote.
“The people of this area fear that their needs and interests will be completely ignored … They humbly pray that no arrangements be entered into with any company which will destroy the livelihood and independence of the Yirrkala people.”
Four copies of the text were printed on paper and pasted on to separate pieces of bark. Around the edges, senior Yolngu artists painted their totems and symbolic markings in ochre, charcoal and pipeclay.
It was the first time the federal parliament had recognised a document which formalised First Nations people’s relationship to the land.
There were four versions of the Yirrkala bark petitions. In 2022, two were on display in Parliament House in Canberra, a third was at the National Museum of Australia, and the fourth was hanging on McKie’s wall, next to a weather vane and a set of keys.
McKie’s former husband, Stan Davey, was a non-Indigenous activist who worked as the secretary of the Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement when the petitions were sent to parliament. He received the document while working with former Indigenous affairs minister Gordon Bryant. When Davey and his wife separated, McKie kept it.
Wright tracked down the petition while writing a book, Naku Dharuk The Bark Petitions. She found a note in the diary of the wife of a former superintendent of the Methodist mission at Yirrkala, who helped community leaders draft the text.
Behrendt heard of the petition’s discovery while chatting to Wright at Mildura airport after a writers festival.
“I knew it was a great story, but I wasn’t sure that it was my story to tell,” she says.
The Euahleyai/Gamillaroi woman also learned that Yananymul Mununggurr, the daughter of the sole surviving original signatory of the petitions, Dhunggala Mununggurr, was a key force in the campaign to bring the petition home.
“Once I heard that strong Aboriginal women were driving the project, I was hooked,” Behrendt says.
The resulting film charts two journeys.
One follows the repatriation of the bark petition from a far corner of the Kimberley to its homeland in Yirrkala, more than 2,000 kilometres away.
The other retraces the bruising and prolonged fight for Aboriginal self determination that followed the Yolngu people’s historic plea for meaningful consultation.
In October 1963, after meeting with Yolngu leaders, a federal parliamentary committee recommended that mining should proceed at Yirrkala, but sacred sites should be protected and compensation paid for loss of livelihood.
But sacred sites were damaged, and mining was expanded. The Yolngu people lodged the first Aboriginal land rights case in 1971, which was unsuccessful but helped pave the way for the 1976 Aboriginal Land Rights Act in the NT.
The documentary takes viewers on a sometimes joyful, often bleak journey through the ensuing decades – from the momentum of the land rights movement to Bob Hawke’s unfulfilled promise of a treaty; the establishment – and then abolition – of the first elected national body for Indigenous people; the Howard government-led NT Intervention, to the defeat of the voice referendum in 2023.
Behrendt said the film was structured to show the common thread that connects the Yirrkala bark petitions to the voice proposal.
“The central request in the petitions was a very generous offer to sit down as equals and discuss what happens on Aboriginal land with Aboriginal people,” she said.
“That request remains as relevant today as ever, particularly post-referendum … [it] is still a part of our political ambitions, and it’s not going to go away.”
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One Mind, One Heart airs at 8.30pm on 19 January on NITV, SBS and SBS On Demand