On a dusty escarpment in northeast Arnhem Land, Yolngu elders are asking visitors to imagine Australia from inside a different centre – a “circle of life”.
Here, anything that cannot be related back to family, Country and law simply “doesn’t belong”.
The 26th annual Garma festival will on Saturday enter its second day at the Gulkula ceremonial site on Yolngu Country, running under the theme Bukmak – “all of us, everyone, together”.
The four-day celebration of Yolngu life and culture held about 40km from Nhulunbuy on the Gove Peninsula concludes on Monday.
For Aboriginal health worker Tonchi McIntosh, Bukmak is not a catchphrase but a description of how life already works here.
Standing on the edge of the bungul (dance) ground where 13 clans helped open the festival on Friday night, he describes what he calls the Yolngu circle of life.
“Inside the Yolngu circle of life, everything is related, and everything is connected, and everything is symbiotic to itself,” Mr McIntosh, who has been adopted into the Yunupingu family clan, said speaking at the request of the Elders he stood alongside.
“Anything that's not in that circle doesn't have a name and doesn't have a relationship to anyone, so it's rejected.
“Anything outside of that circle, like rheumatic heart disease, or cancer, or pest animals, or pest weeds … if they're not related to the younger circle of life, they reject it - it doesn't belong there.”
On opening night, that circle took physical form as dancers from 13 clans surged forward in lines, bodies marked in white gapan clay and ochre, skirts swaying to the pulse of yidaki (didgeridoo) and bilma (clapsticks).
This is Country.
"This is our family's beginning ... right on the very earth where they feel like their spirits connected," he said.
That sense of belonging starts before birth with learning the didgeridoo for example.
"Their fathers make sure they hear the didgeridoo … and the day they're born, it's already part of their life," Mr McIntosh said.
“So their understanding … of the circle of life, comes second nature.”
The festival will feature policy forums and marquees filled with politicians, business leaders and community delegates, including Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Minister for Indigenous Australians Senator Malarndirri McCarthy.
Mr McIntosh said the real test of Bukmak would be whether those systems are prepared to move closer to the Yolngu circle instead of insisting it moved toward them.
“This civilisation has survived since, you know, way before any of us, and there's no way it's going away."
Hosted by the Yothu Yindi Foundation, the Garma festival showcases traditional miny’tji (art), manikay (song), bunggul (dance) and story-telling, and is a major meeting point for Yolngu clans and families from across the region.
