Forum Overview: Concluding Reflections
Garma: Many Ways of Knowing
Professor Stephen Garnett
Professor of Tropical Knowledge, Charles Darwin University
From the edge of the Garma meeting ground one can see the sea across a broad forested coastal plain. For the many Ŋapaki visitors to Garma from southern Australia that pleasant breakfast view was but a backdrop to cultural theatre, a mixture of earnest forum discussion and dusty afternoons of yidaki and buŋgul – all of them exotic, tropical, and known but momentarily through the romantic lenses of the fleeting itinerant. Some Ŋapaki, with better knowledge of the tropics, might have described a woodland dominated by Darwin stringybark Eucalyptus tertadonta on an uplifted laterised bauxite plateau leading down to mangrove-lined creeks and a sandy foreshore to the north-west Gulf of Carpentaria, the whole scene fitting comfortably into an evolutionary framework with biological speciation driven by climate change and continental drift.
But there were many ways of knowing that landscape at Garma. For the Dhimurru rangers I spoke with, Yolŋu owners of that land, the health of that landscape was a personal responsibility. A magic landscape, perhaps, peopled by the living and their ancestors, their stories and their spirits, a continuum from land to sea about which each Yolŋu generation learns as soon as they can comprehend. One of the reasons for Garma seems to be so that outsiders, particularly Ŋapaki, can be given the opportunity to comprehend that Yolŋu knowledge of their landscape is not only comprehensive but that Yolŋu explanations of its physical manifestations are utterly different to those of Ŋapaki, and that the Yolŋu people assert a validity of those beliefs even as they demonstrate their adaptation to foreign cultures thrust upon them.
Because of course Ŋapaki are not the first. The small party of Macassans, symbolically returning to shores they once visited regularly as traders, with slow, sinuous, drummed dances utterly different from those performed to the yidaki by competing groups of Yolŋu, must have had a third view of the Garma landscape. Perhaps it was Catholic, I could not ask, perhaps they knew that a single God had created all we could see, or perhaps their reality was framed in the pre-Catholic beliefs of their sea-trading ancestors. Whichever one can guarantee that their knowledge differed greatly from that of any other group present.
I wondered how much the different knowledges were shared. In many ways the Key Forum was about trade in knowledge, where once bech-der-mer were traded with Macassans, now Indigenous people and Ŋapaki shared ideas on how culture, art, music and landscapes, could be used to capture resources from the outside world. Across the buŋgul ground such trade was happening, yidaki master classes, and all sorts of activities in the women's shelters to which I was not privy. But the currency was money, rrupiya, and one felt that transactions included little understanding of, let alone changes to, belief systems.
It was after the discussions were over, however, that knowledges hybridised most effectively. When the loudspeakers kicked into life using power from distant generators the better to amplify the rhythm of clap sticks and yidaki and songs from a time when there was only knowledge about the Yolŋu lands. It was best exemplified on the last night with a performance of Yothu Yindi, the band that has carried Yolŋu knowledge around the world, and made it possible for Garma to be realised. The songs reverberated across the Arnhem Land night with a message transcending the different knowledges and spoke to the universal knowledge of being human.