The Law Is Sung: Yolŋu on Sixty Thousand Years

You keep your law in books on a shelf, and a room of people can change it on a Tuesday. We keep ours in song. The difference is that ours cannot be amended by a person acting alone, because the song is held in pieces by different clans and no one holds all of it.

Madayin is the word. It covers what you would separate into law, title, liturgy, and the objects that authorise all three. A song cycle establishes who belongs to which water, which stretch of coast, which stand of paperbark. When there is a dispute the question is not what a judge thinks. The question is who holds that section of the song.

Everything here is one of two halves — Dhuwa or Yirritja. The rain, the birds, the trees, the people. And you must marry the other half. Yothu Yindi means child and mother, and it describes how the two halves hold each other in place. It is the reason a person can walk into a camp four hundred kilometres away and know instantly who is their brother and who they must not speak to directly.

Sixty thousand years is a number that has stopped meaning anything to people because it is too large. Put it this way: the sea level rose a hundred and twenty metres and we watched it. The coastline in our songs is not this coastline. It is the one further out, the one that is under water now. We sing a place you would need a boat and sonar to find.

The Macassans came in praus for trepang, for centuries, before your ships. We traded with them, we married some of them, we have their words in our language and their tamarind trees on our beaches. So do not tell us that contact with the outside world began in 1788. We had an arrangement. The arrangement had terms.

That is what I want from members who come. Terms. A permit, a number, a season, and a list of what is closed. Some things on this Country you will not see, and you will not be told why, and if you can accept that without negotiating then you are the sort of guest we can have.