Aboriginal people have inhabited the Yirrkala region for more than 40,000 years. The Methodist Church of Australasia established a mission at Yirrkala in 1935. Over the following decades, members of the 13 clans that owned land in the surrounding area were gradually drawn into the mission. Friction between these different groups was an early problem.
Location
Yirrkala is on the east coast of the Gove peninsula in north-east Arnhem Land, 18 km south of Nhulunbuy. Many people live intermittently between Yirrkala and surrounding homelands.
Yirrkala played a pivotal role in the development of the relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians when a bark petition was created at Yirrkala in 1963 and sent to the Federal Government to protest at the Prime Minister's announcement that a parcel of their land was to be sold to a bauxite mining company.
Although the petition itself was unsuccessful in the sense that the bauxite mining at Nhulunbuy went ahead as planned, it alerted non-indigenous Australians to the need for indigenous representation in such decisions, and prompted a government report recommending payment of compensation, protection of sacred sites, creation of a permanent parliamentary standing committee to scrutinise developments at Yirrkala, and also acknowledged the indigenous people's moral right to their lands. The Bark Petition is on display in the Parliament House in Canberra.
In the 1970s several groups set up outstation communities on their own lands. By the 1980s there were about 10 outstations, with a total population around 200. Today all clans have at least one homeland centre, and many people live partly in Yirrkala and partly in their homelands. In the mid-1970s the church handed control of the mission to the Yirrkala Dhanbul Community Association, which consisted of representatives from the main clans.
Yirrkala is home to a number of leading indigenous artists, whose traditional Aboriginal art, particularly bark painting, can be found in art galleries around the world, and whose work frequently wins awards such as the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards. Their work is available to the public from the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Art Centre and Museum and also from the YBE art centre.
Members of the indigenous rock band Yothu Yindi hail from Yirrkala. It is also a traditional home of the Yidaki (didgeridoo), and some of the world's finest didgeridoos are still made at Yirrkala.
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