Dear Friends,

I would like to draw your attention to Marcia Langton’s very moving essay-tribute to Dr. Yunupingu, published in the May 2003 issue of The Monthly (https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2023/may/marcia-langton/energy-power-strength-dr-yunupingu#mtr

Unfortunately, the essay is available to subscribers only. However, the magazine allows free access to one essay each month.  

In her essay, Langton quotes from Dr Yunupingu’s speeches and articles. Like the essay they are illuminating and inspiring.

The essay and the wise words of Dr. Yunupingu have convinced me once again why it is important for us to support the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Voice, enshrined in the Australian Constitution.

Here is one powerful and poignant quote from the essay (page 40):

'Today, almost 30 years after my father passed away, I still hold his clapsticks and I am the leader of my clan – with other senior family members I am the keeper and teacher of our song cycles, our ceremonies, our laws and our future. I care for and protect my clan. But I have not mastered the future. I find that I now spend my days worrying about how I can protect the present from the future. I feel the future moving in on the Yolngu world, Gumatj world, like an inevitable tide, except every year the tide rises further, moving up on us, threatening to drown us under the water, unable to rise again. The water stands under our feet shift and move so often – the land to which we can reach out is often distant, unknown.

I look around me at the Yolngu world. I worry about the lives of the little ones that I see around me, including my own children – my youngest daughter is barely eight years old. I have more than a dozen grandchildren. I look back now a lifetime of effort and I see that we have not moved very far at all. For all the talk, all the policy, all the events, all the media spectaculars and fine speeches, the gala dinners, what has been achieved? I have maintained the traditions, kept the law, performed my role – yet the Yolngu world is in crisis; we have stood still. I look around me and I feel the powerlessness of all our leaders. All around me are do-gooders and no-hopers – can I say this? Whitefellas. Balanda. They all seem to be one and the same sometimes: talking, talking – smothering us – but with no vision to guide them; holding all the power, all the money, all the knowledge for what to do and how to work the white world. Only on the ceremonial ground do our leaders still lead – everywhere else we are simply paid lip service. Or bound up in red tape.

And the “gap” the politicians now talk of grows larger as we speak, as I talk: as the next session of parliament starts or as the next speech is given by the next politician, the gap gets wider. I don’t think anyone except the few of us who have lived our lives in the Aboriginal world understand this task that is called “closing the gap”.'

As I read the above words, I hear clearly the deep lament in the voice of Dr. Yunupingu. Most of all he laments the lack of ‘vision to guide…’ our way beyond all the talking. 

The proposed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice enshrined in the Australian Constitution, which can speak to and be heard by the Australian Parliament and the Executive Government has the potential to become that guide. 

I hope it can.

Thanks for your support and best wishes,

Subhash