In writing of the theorisation of relationships between Aboriginal people and the state, and of understanding continuity and change in that context, Merlan (1998: 180–1) contrasts three views. She argues that both Sahlins (1993) and Cowlishaw (1988) have a ‘vision of indigenous cultural production as autonomous’, the former framing change as an adaptive process and the latter as opposition or resistance. She characterises her own theoretical position in terms of the intercultural: ‘the contemporary Australian scene … cannot be fundamentally understood in this way [in terms of autonomous production] … That scene is not one of autonomy, but of still unequal, intercultural production’.
The Yolngu themselves (as might be predicted from the previous section, and from their espousal of the ‘two worlds’ view) would favour the Sahlins view, with perhaps a dash of Cowlishaw, particularly in relation to their response to the incursion of the mine. Yet another analytic framework (H. Morphy 2007) posits the relative autonomy of systems of cultural production, each with its own properties and trajectory through time. This approach privileges neither ‘adaptation’ nor ‘resistance’ as modes of interaction with other systems, and allows such interactions to have effects on a system and on its trajectory without compromising its relative autonomy.
Such a model captures the Yolngu view and seems more relevant from an analytic point of view to the facts of the Yolngu case than a model that portrays everything as ‘intercultural’. The relative lateness of the colonial incursion into northeast Arnhem Land, and its partial and predominantly peaceful nature, spared the Yolngu from the more devastating consequences of colonisation experienced by Aboriginal people in most other parts of the continent, including the area that is the focus of Merlan’s analysis. It is possible to mount a cogent argument for the relative autonomy of the Yolngu system.
Where the Yolngu view and the analyst’s view might diverge is in the analysis of the effects of interaction between the Yolngu system and that of the encapsulating settler state. The ‘two worlds’ view has been effectively unchallenged by the state until recently. In hindsight, however, it has proved to be a source of vulnerability as well as strength, for it has perhaps concealed from the Yolngu the extent to which their ‘world’ depends for its space to exist and follow its current trajectory upon institutions of the encapsulating state (Morphy and Morphy 2007). For more than a generation, two of the most important of these institutions—the fee simple status of Aboriginal land under ALRA and the CDEP program—had seemed permanent, and were taken-for-granted features of the social landscape. All this was to change between 2005 and 2007.
The foundation of the Yolngu social system and system of governance is gurrutu—the complex networks of kinship that link individuals and groups to each other. Underlying gurrutu, and anchoring the human groups that are linked by gurrutu to their land and sea estates, is rom. Often translated as ‘law’, rom is a much more encompassing concept. It is nothing less than the Yolngu way of being, conceived as having been set down in the time of wangarr (creation) by beings who are still present in the landscape, and whose substance each Yolngu person shares through the conception spirit that enters their mother and gives life to the physical substance of the baby.
A person belongs to the bäpurru of their father. In one meaning of the term, bäpurru are the groups in which the ownership of land and sea estates is vested, and the meaning encompasses not just the living representatives of the group but also its spiritual essence located in the clan estate, the product of wangarr activity. Clan members are wänga-watangu (‘place-belongs to’ [people]; i.e. those to whom the place belongs, and who belong to the place) with respect to their clan’s estates. In the anthropological literature, bäpurru are termed ‘clans’ (H. Morphy 1984, 1991, 2003; Williams 1986, 1987), ‘patrifilial descent groups’ (Keen 1994, 2003) or ‘patri-groups’ (Keen 2006), and Yolngu themselves often use the English word ‘tribe’ to describe them.[10] The Yolngu universe is divided into two exogamous patrimoieties called Dhuwa and Yirritja.[11] Each clan and its estates and creator wangarr beings belong either to one moiety or to the other. By definition then, clans are also exogamous.
In the Yolngu marriage system (see Fig. 5.3) a man marries his matrilateral cross cousin—his mother’s mother’s brother’s daughter’s daughter (MMBDD) (galay). A woman marries her patrilateral cross-cousin (dhuway). A man and his sister must therefore take spouses from different groups. The clans involved in the marriage of a man are: his mother’s mother’s clan (his märi), who bestow on him a mother-in-law (mukul rumaru) (his MMBD); his own clan; his mother’s clan (his ngändi); and his wife’s own clan (which may be the same clan as his own mother belongs to, but need not be). The marriage of the man’s sister involves a different (but often overlapping) chain of linked clans.
Viewed over time, the Yolngu marriage system constructs long-term relationships of bestowal and marriage that link groups of both moieties. The relationship between a person and their mother’s clan (of the opposite moiety) is some times referred to as yothu-yindi (child-mother). Just as a person is waku to his/her mother and her brother, so he/she stands in a waku relationship to his/her mother’s (ngändi) clan. Waku have special responsibilities to their ngändi clan. In fulfilling these responsibilities they are termed djunggayarr (or djunggayi), often translated into English as ‘manager’ or ‘caretaker’ or sometimes ‘policeman’. In essence, they have a duty of care to their mother’s estate, and this involves helping—or sometimes ensuring that—the ngändi clan members look after their country properly, both in mundane and ceremonial contexts.
An equally significant relationship is constructed between two clans of the same moiety who stand in a relationship of märi (MM) and gutharra (DD) to one another, because over time the märi clan bestows mothers-in-law on members of the gutharra clan.[12] This structure is illustrated in Fig. 5.4. The märi-gutharra connection between two clans is central to the Yolngu system of governance.
Fig. 5.4 The märi–gutharra and ngändi–waku relationships between clans, from the perspective of a Madarrpa sibling pair
In the past, and to a considerable extent still in the present, most marriages tended to take place between members of geographically neighbouring clans, and so over time ‘connubia’—that is, regional groupings of clans that are linked in sets of marriage relationships—tend to emerge. In the northern Blue Mud Bay area, for example, the Manggalili clan provides mothers-in-law to the Madarrpa clan, and the Madarrpa in turn provide mothers-in law to the Munyuku (see Fig. 5.4). The clans from which wives come (i.e. the clan into which the mother-in-law is married) are, for the Madarrpa, predominantly the Dhudi Djapu and the Marrakulu clans, and for the Munyuku, predominantly the Gupa Djapu. The Dhudi Djapu clan, in turn, provides mothers-in-law to the Gupa Djapu.
The existence of connubia is not merely statistical—they are not simply an emergent property of the local system of kinship and marriage. They are recognised by Yolngu as a social fact. Connubia are often associated with regional names.[13] For example, the northern Blue Mud Bay clans are the Gindirrpuyngu ‘people of the floodplains’ or Djalkiripuyngu ‘foot(print) people’.[14] These cultural properties of connubia are a factor in their reproduction over time.
Connubia are nodal networks rather than bounded groups. Their networks intersect with those of other similarly constituted connubia. For example the märi for Manggalili are the Yarrwidi Gumatj, and this links Manggalili to the Laynhapuy connubium that is focused around Caledon Bay to the north. These networks of individuals may stretch out beyond the connubium in which other members of their clan are embedded. In the Blue Mud Bay area, for example, there is another märi-gutharra chain that links some members of the Madarrpa clan, through marriage, to groups on Groote Eylandt, and other individuals are linked to groups to the south and inland, again through their marriages.
Despite the challenges posed by colonisation and its aftermath, the underlying principles of the Yolngu gurrutu system are largely intact. As a system it can be said to exist in a state of relative autonomy: not untouched or uninfluenced by its contact with settler Australian society, but, nevertheless, with structures and systems of value that have their own trajectory. The system was always flexible and adaptive, and it has continued to be so in the face of the changes ensuing on the colonial process. The demography of small groups is rarely stable; some groups decline in number over time while others expand. The Yolngu system was flexible enough in the past to deal with such contingencies, and it had mechanisms for succession when individual clan groups declined to a point where they could no longer partake fully in the system. In brief, if a clan becomes depleted or extinct a gutharra clan that shares the same wangarr inheritance will (ideally) first assume responsibility for looking after that clan’s estate, and, if extinction follows, it will assume ownership of it (H. Morphy 2003). There is no reason to suppose that connubia were ever static entities with bounded memberships. Both political and demographic factors work over time to shift the nodal foci.
Since mission times, with sedentarisation, a certain fixing of connubia has been taking place. Today, they tend to be associated with groups of geographically contiguous homelands, situated on the clan estates of the constituent clans. Djambawa Marawili (pers. comm., 4 October 2007) draws an analogy between a group of connubially-linked homelands and a town, with each homeland being a ‘suburb’. The spatial relationship between clans and their estates, and between clans within a connubium on neighbouring estates (see Morphy and Morphy 2006), is thus reinforced by the physical presence of settlement infrastructure. But at the same time, the Yolngu lifestyle is characterised by high levels of mobility. Short-term, localised mobility is fuelled by both social and purely logistic considerations. Only one of the Laynha homelands has a store, and so it is necessary for most homelands dwellers to go either to Nhulunbuy or Yirrkala to shop for food and other necessities. People also have to travel to meetings, for training, for medical appointments, and even on occasion further afield for such things as art exhibition openings in metropolitan centres. Ceremony, particularly in the context of funerals and boys’ initiation rites, is a major and frequent cause of short-term mobility (see F. Morphy 2007a, 2007c). Visiting kin in other communities is also a factor, particularly during school holidays. People tend to be more mobile at certain times in their lives—many young adults, particularly young men who have not yet married and ‘settled down’, are highly mobile in the medium term. They are referred to as dhukarrpuyngu (‘people of the track’), and move frequently between households and communities where they have kin. In the longer term—but here we enter the realm of speculation since no reliable research exists on the extent, trajectory and nature of outmigration—are those who are ‘economic’ migrants to places where there are ‘real’ jobs, or even medical migrants.[15] If one sits at a particular homeland in any particular week, the impression can be one of constant flux and movement as vehicles and planes come and go. Yolngu are still very much ‘people who move around’.
Gurrutu continues to be the Yolngu ‘governance environment’ par excellence. The domain of governance is the management of relationships, both mundane and ceremonial, between groups at various levels of articulation from the very local to the regional.[16]
At the level of the clan, primogeniture and gender are the most important determinants of ascribed leadership status, but there are quite effective checks to the automatic ascription of power to people in powerful structural positions. Personal autonomy is highly valued and may be strongly asserted (sometimes by avoidance of situations in which the power of others can be exercised). Ultimately a ‘good’ leader is a person to whom other people will listen, and who can create and maintain consensus—a sense of ngayangu wanggany ‘one feeling’ or mulkurr wanggany ‘one mind’ (see F. Morphy 2007c). Thus, leadership is conferred conditionally and has to be constantly earned. It is a process rather than an ascribed position in a hierarchy, although some people do start with structural advantages. Whereas English-speakers tend to talk about the ‘head’ of a family or organisation, the predominant Yolngu metaphor is ngurru—‘nose, prow of canoe’. The English metaphor implies a view of a leader as the apex of a vertical hierarchy, whereas the Yolngu metaphor implies a view of a leader as someone who carries others behind him.[17]
On the Laynhapuy homelands, the Yolngu system of governance still operates according to these principles. It has adapted to the circumstances of small settlement life. It still depends on the same mix: ‘good’ leaders are those who can lead through consensus and, all things being equal, they tend to be the first-born sons of the leaders of the preceding generation. And the system is still grounded, in the sense that homelands settlements tend to cohere around the senior male members of the estate-owning clan (see Barber, forthcoming).
‘Fairness’, ‘equality’ and ‘democracy’, the cornerstones of ‘good’ governance in western liberal democracies, are not salient to this system. There is nothing ‘fair’ or ‘equal’ about male primogeniture—all people are not created equal, and leaders are not ‘elected’ on democratic principles. But this system has its own set of checks and balances (or mechanisms of accountability): leaders who lead by consensus are constrained by the need to reproduce consensus. Disaffected ‘constituents’ can ‘vote with their feet’, withdraw their support, and align themselves with another leader (or become one themselves if they can garner the support).
At a regional level, affairs are ordered by groups of senior leaders according to the same principles. There is no fixed hierarchy or fixed membership of such groups, but once again certain individuals will be regarded as pre-eminent because of their knowledge (mundane and sacred), seniority, and/or the size and structural position of their clan within a regional system.
In Yolngu society, there is not the same strict separation of male and female domains that is found, for example, in some desert societies. Nevertheless, power relations and the expression of power are gendered. Women are not excluded from power and influence, or from positions of leadership, except in certain restricted ceremonial contexts, but they do not generally attempt to exert their authority overtly in public contexts in the same way that men do. At public meetings, men tend to sit centre stage, with the most senior men in the most central positions, and women sit on the periphery. It is mostly men who speak, but women monitor proceedings carefully, and senior women interject comments into male ‘performances’ or sometimes take the floor if they feel that the discussion is not going as it should. If male leaders fail to achieve the consensus of senior women, then it is unlikely that whatever decision they make will take effect.
For some time, women have been taking positions of power and authority in certain intercultural contexts, particularly education. The head teacher of the school at Yirrkala was until recently a Yolngu woman, and the head teacher at Gapuwiyak is also a Yolngu woman. At Laynha, following the recent departure of the non-Yolngu Chief Executive Officer (CEO), his successor is a Yolngu woman.[18]
[10] The differences in terminology reflect the authors’ different conceptualisations of these groups. Bäpurru may also be used to refer to a set of clans linked ceremonially by the travels of particular wangarr beings, reflecting a Yolngu modelling of the social world that privileges connections over boundaries when considering the relationship between groups. Further discussion of this issue falls outside the scope of this chapter.
[11] A patrimoiety is one in which a person inherits their membership from their father. An exogamous group is one that does not allow marriage between its members.
[12] That is, a man bestows his daughter as mother-in-law, and therefore his daughter’s daughter as wife, to his sister’s daughter’s son. A man calls both his mother’s mother and her brother märi, and they call him (and his sisters) gutharra.
[13] The Yolngu naming of groups at various levels is an extremely complex issue. The pioneering (and most comprehensive) study is Schebeck (2001). Williams (1986: 57–74) also has an extended discussion of names and their meanings.
[14] Djalkiri, (‘foot’, ‘footprint’) like many Yolngu terms for body parts, is entangled in a complex metaphorical universe (see also Tamisari 1998). It may also refer to an ‘ancestral imprint on the landscape’, and it is sometimes translated as ‘foundation’—that is, ‘the origin of law and identity’. In the name ‘Djalkiripuyngu’ it refers ostensibly to footprints in the mud of Blue Mud Bay, but may also carry the connotation that these groups are the ‘foundation’ people with respect to rom.
[15] As in other parts of Indigenous Australia, kidney failure as a consequence of diabetes is unfortunately becoming common. Until very recently, there were no facilities for dialysis in Arnhem Land. Yolngu suffering from renal failure had to live semi-permanently in Darwin to avail themselves of the facilities there. There was a bucket of money from the NT Department of Health (delivered through Laynha) to support them and their families to live in Darwin, but no bucket in the Health Department’s hospital budget to pay the technicians necessary to maintain a dialysis facility in Nhulunbuy Area Hospital.
[16] For an extended analysis of Yolngu leadership in relationship to land, and particularly in relation to religious aspects that fall outside the scope of this paper, see Williams (1986, 1987).
[17] The term ngurru is not generally applied to women in the context of clan leadership, but if a woman happens to be the first-born person in her generation (malamarr), and if she is a person with a strong personality, she may sometimes take on ‘ngurru-like’ roles. On one famous occasion in the 1970s, the female malamarr of a large clan, a formidable woman, led a party of her clansmen to do battle with another group.
[18] Women have also become increasingly prominent as artists since the 1970s.