Key Forum Opening Speech
By Galarrwuy Yunupiŋu - 6 August 2005
Honoured guests, ladies and gentlemen and countrymen one and all.
Welcome to the 2005 Garma Festival - the seventh festival since Garma began in 1999 - all organised by the Yothu Yindi Foundation.
The theme for this year's festival is 'Indigenous Cultural Livelihoods'.
Culture and livelihood are Yothu Yindi - they go hand in hand - you cannot have one without the other.
Strong culture means strong lives, strong people, and a strong society.
Yolŋu culture and Yolŋu people are strong, and the aim of Garma is to share our culture and our livelihood with all people in Australia and the world.
This year there will be major workshops regarding visual art, performance and music, and tourism - all well-known and important activities which promote both culture and livelihoods.
These activities work best when they are well organised with good leadership. Leadership, and partnerships with business, will be integrated into these workshops.
Yolŋu culture and Yolŋu people are strong not only because we have lived here and looked after our country and sacred sites since time immemorial.
We are strong because our culture and our rights have been recognised at law for thirty years under the Commonwealth Land Rights Act - which was introduced in 1976 after our native title challenge to the bauxite mine failed.
This legal recognition of our rights led to a great flowering of Aboriginal culture throughout Australia and the world.
Aboriginal culture and rights are a bedrock of the tourist industry, as icons like Uluru, Kakadu and Nitmiluk show. Aboriginal art and music are world-renowned and bring income to remote communities.
At Garma in 2003 I had the pleasure of presenting a beautiful hollow log coffin painted with traditional designs to representatives of Alcan, which now operates the bauxite mine and refinery.
My purpose was to promote a new relationship with Alcan, a partnership with traditional owners - in circumstances where there had never been a partnership between traditional owners and Nabalco who operated the mine until 2001.
This new relationship with Alcan is well underway but more is required before it can be a true partnership with true recognition of Yolŋu culture and traditional rights to land.
This land on which Garma is once again being held, Gulkula, is Aboriginal land. Yolŋu people own the stories and the ceremonies for their land which was created by our ancestors.
Gulkula is the place where the ancestor Ganbulabula brought the Yidaki (didgeridu) into being among the Gumatj people.
But Yolŋu people also own rights to all the resources of their land, the trees, the animals, the earth, and the minerals - including the bauxite which lies just underneath many parts of north-east Arnhem land.
This means that development of land and resources can only happen in partnership with traditional owners.
The bauxite mine and refinery at Nhulunbuy is the only mine on Aboriginal land where there is no agreement or partnership with traditional owners.
All the others, the uranium mine at Ranger and proposed for Jabiluka and Koongarra, the gold mines in the Tanami, even the manganese mine on Groote Eylandt, are the subject of agreements with traditional owners with negotiated benefits.
And the 1992 recognition of native title in the Mabo case means that there are now many negotiated mining agreements with traditional owners throughout Australia.
Indeed in recent years major companies have addressed the wrongs of the past by negotiating agreements with traditional owners - including the 2001 Comalco agreement regarding the pre-existing Weipa bauxite mine, and the 2004 Rio Tinto agreement regarding the pre-existing Argyle diamond mine (which is built on a major barramundi Dreaming site).
In the twenty-first century it is inappropriate that as yet there is no negotiated agreement for future bauxite mining at Nhulunbuy.
I look forward to progressing and finalising such an agreement so that there can be a true partnership of mutual benefit between Alcan and traditional owners.
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| Galarrwuy Yunupiŋu (Photograph by Andrea Keningston) |