The pastoral frontier, pushing from the south and west, ground to a halt at Florida Station on the southwestern fringes of the Yolngu region in 1885 (Berndt and Berndt 1954: 98–9). In the area around that station, Yolngu groups suffered depopulation in the 1890s, but the rest of the Yolngu region was substantially unaffected. There were sporadic incursions further into Yolngu country by prospecting expeditions (ibid. 93). During this period, Yolngu gained the reputation of being dangerous and unpredictable ‘wild blacks’ (Morphy and Morphy 1984). In the early 1900s, according to Yolngu oral history that is backed up in some cases by written accounts, a series of punitive expeditions were mounted into Yolngu territory. From the Yolngu perspective these expeditions were arbitrary acts of violence perpetrated by hostile invaders.

It was not until the 1930s that three interrelated events precipitated the ‘pacification’ of the Yolngu region (Berndt and Berndt 1954; Dewar 1992; Egan 1996). These were the killing of some Japanese pearlers at Caledon Bay in 1932, and of two white men, Fagan and Traynor, in 1933 in the vicinity of Woodah Island, and finally the spearing of Constable McColl on Woodah Island.^[6] In Yolngu oral history, all these killings happened as a result of the behaviour of the victims.

The reaction in the southern States at first was to send in a punitive expedition to avenge the deaths and ‘teach the wild blacks a lesson’. Wiser council prevailed, however; the missionaries who were by now established on the fringes of Yolngu territory to the south and west and on Groote Eylandt, offered to intercede, and so too did the anthropologist Donald Thomson.^[7]

Methodist missions were established in the Yolngu area during the 1920s at Milingimbi, and then later in the 30s and 40s at Yirrkala and Elcho Island (Galiwin’ku). The Yolngu did not perceive this as an act of colonisation. Thomson reported to the Commonwealth Government in 1937 that Aborigines in Arnhem Land ‘believe they are still living under their own laws, and that they have no reason to recognise a new regime has taken over their affairs’ (cited in Attwood 2003: 116). And Williams (1987: 20) comments that ‘[f]rom a Yolngu perspective it was Mawalan, as head of the land-owning Rirratjingu clan, who granted permission to Chaseling, as agent of the “mission” to establish the station at Yirrkala [in 1935]’. The missionaries were few in number and came with peaceful intent, and early superintendents, such as Wilbur Chaseling at Yirrkala, showed respect for Yolngu culture and took a syncretic attitude to the introduction of Christianity that did not seek to eradicate the Yolngu belief system.^[8]

The missionaries did seek to centralise the population in the mission settlements through the provision of rations and schooling for the children (the latter was valued by Yolngu from the outset), but there was no coercion or forced removal of people from their lands. Not all Yolngu went into the missions to live; some groups stayed out on their clan estates, coming into the mission from time to time for supplies or medical attention. Others lived at the missions most of the time, but returned regularly to their country, particularly during school holidays. Many members of the southern clans of the Blue Mud Bay area went south to Numbulwar (then Rose River) or to Umbakumba on Groote Eylandt rather than north to Yirrkala.

From the perspective of the senior Yolngu generations of today, this period, which lasted until the early 1960s, was something of a Golden Age. Interaction with outsiders, mediated through the missionaries, was sporadic and usually peaceful, and while sedenterisation on missions created some strains and tensions the Yolngu social fabric was not shattered, and the Yolngu were not dispossessed and alienated from their country.

The most senior living generation of today’s Yolngu leaders spent their formative years in this era. Many of them, through the efforts of the missionaries, received a good western-style education; several went south or to Brisbane for further education. The Yolngu of this generation have never fully acceded to the proposition that their sovereignty over their clan estates has been eclipsed by the process of colonisation; they see themselves as encapsulated, but not colonised, as living in ‘two worlds’ (F. Morphy 2007b).

In the late 1950s, Yolngu became aware of prospecting activity on the Gove Peninsula, and discovered shortly afterwards that mining leases had been taken out over considerable areas of Yolngu land. There had been no consultation with Yolngu. Their response, in 1963, was to send a petition framed in bark to the Federal Parliament, demanding, among other things, the recognition of their rights in land and sea. It is significant that from the very beginning of the struggle against the coming of the mine the local clans whose land was affected received active support from the other Yolngu of the region.

The events that followed are well known and well documented, and will not be detailed here (see Attwood 2003; Wells 1982). The Yolngu were ultimately unsuccessful in their efforts to block the development of the mine and the building of the mining town of Nhulunbuy. Yolngu leaders asked for Nhulunbuy to be a dry area, foreseeing all too clearly what the effects of the introduction of alcohol would be, but in this too they were unsuccessful. Nevertheless, the Yolngu struggle to protect their rights was ultimately a significant factor in the advent of land rights and the passing of the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act (1976 (Cth) (ALRA). The irony is not lost on the Yolngu.

The move out of Yirrkala and back to permanent settlements on the homelands was precipitated by the social trauma that followed the building of the mining town and the introduction of alcohol to the area. But it was also motivated by a positive desire to protect clan estates from further incursion, to demonstrate to outsiders that northeast Arnhem Land was not an uninhabited ‘wilderness’. In the beginning, people received very little support—opinion among local missionaries, who had been very supportive in the struggle against the mine, was divided. With the logistic help of just a very few people, most notably the Fijian lay missionary Jonetani Rika, Yolngu groups began to go back to their country in 1971–72. At first they lived in bush shelters and had no reliable food supply apart from that obtained through hunting and gathering. Overland access was difficult—over a network of rough tracks that were impassable during the wet season—and there were very few vehicles. People cleared their airstrips by hand.^[9]

This homelands movement was thus a Yolngu initiative (Morphy and Marika 2005: 1), and began before there was any official support from government for such movements. It predated the era of ‘self-determination’ ushered in by the first Whitlam Government, and it predated the ALRA. Subsequent policy settings certainly supported the movement both financially and logistically, but to suggest that it was a ‘socialist experiment’ perpetrated on Yolngu (see Hughes 2007) is a distortion of the historical record.

In the early 1970s, the Uniting Church ceded the administration of Yirrkala and its outstations to the Dhanbul Association—a Yolngu council that was incorporated under the NT’s Associations Incorporation Act 1963. At first, the servicing of the homelands was part of Dhanbul’s responsibility. As the homelands grew in number, the perception also grew among homelands people that their interests were regarded by Dhanbul as secondary to those of the clans who were the traditional owners of Yirrkala and the area covered by the mine. In 1984–85 Laynha was established as a separate association, also under the NT’s Associations Act. The separate establishment of Marngarr, as the governing body of the settlement of Gunyangara (Ski Beach) on Gupa Gumatj clan land nearer to the mine’s processing plant, soon followed.

In many ways, what was happening was a dissolution or weakening of the alliances between the groups who had joined forces to fight the Gove case, and who had been gathered together under the polity of the mission. The splits that occurred reflect the spheres of interest created by missionisation and the coming of the mine, lying, as it were, over the top of pre-existing, intra-Yolngu nodes and networks of political interaction. In the case of Laynha, an additional impetus to separate incorporation came from the Blue Mud Bay clans’ involvement in the homelands movement, since they had never been a significant part of the Yirrkala mission polity.

The young adults who followed their parents back home and did most of the hard labour in the early days are now the senior generation living on the homelands. For them the homelands are the bastions of Yolngu identity, where people have the power to filter the influences of the outside world. They recognise that they are now inextricably linked economically to the wider society, but they wish to have control over the nature and intensity of those links. Today, they see the need for economic development on the homelands to provide meaningful employment that will keep the younger generations from drifting to the bigger settlements and the influences of the mining town. They are also keen to see improvements in the health, housing and infrastructure of their communities and in the education of their children.