Manala Marika Guluruŋa (our brother’s daughter), Rulyapa (2018). (The Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Art Centre archives)
Women cry milkarri to guide our loved ones, living and dead. We cry milkarri to greet the dawn, to make the new day. We remake ourselves and Country, we gather the clouds. We cry milkarri in grief, bittersweet, with love, to heal.
Milkarri’s healing sound, its intensity straight from our heart, from our love and grief. Our tears.
Women keen the tears of milkarri for what is there. We keen milkarri for Country, for all our beautiful Countries, both Dhuwa and Yirritja.
If we are keening milkarri for the dawn at a Yirritja place, we cry the milkarri for the mist and through the mist, the spiders making their web. We cry milkarri for the first bird that sings at dawn, waking the other animals up.
When we do that, we are making the spider exist, helping it along, building its home, so that it can get its food and be alive, so that it can continue to be alive and survive. This is not make-believe, not something imagined. It is true, and it’s the same for Dhuwa. Whatever we cry, whether it be animals, grubs, trees, sun, wind, person, anything on the earth as well as in the sea and in the sky, we bring it to life. The ecosystems exist because we do the milkarri.
And we are part of the ecosystem, that’s what we are. We have lived like this since forever and beyond. Lots of things have changed since the arrival of the missionaries, but luckily lots of things have not changed. We eat off the land. We go hunt and we gather meat, fish, eggs, shellfish, honey, and food plants, including vegetables, yams, nuts and fruits. They are pleasurable activities, plus you get to eat what you find and catch.
Djulwanbirr Mungurrawuy Yunupiŋu painting. (The Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Art Centre archives and courtesy of Peter Wiedkuhn)
And we haven’t lost our milkarri, our crying for the land, our grief or the deep connection. That is the beauty of it.
Our milkarri, our keening, is the women’s part of the spirals that make the rain, the clouds, the land. A women’s cry is another way of celebrating. When we keen or cry, it’s a story we are telling. It’s telling a story in keening.
We keen our lives and Country. We keen a person’s birth, we keen what they’ve seen in life, what they hear and what they feel. We cry the wind blowing, them going out and getting something, what they catch. If they’re Dhuwa, then we keen milkarri and sing Dhuwa songs. If Yirritja, Yirritja songs, the same. From the day they are born to the day they die, we cry them. We sing the person, us women make the person alive by singing through the tears of our milkarri, telling a story of what that person did when they were alive.
How deep it is, the milkarri. The person becomes part of that songspiral, part of every particle, every being that we sing. So, Goŋ-gurtha is about the hunter and the fire. When we keen milkarri, we become the hunter, we become the fire.
It brings us back to the moment. It is the present, the past and the future. If we are singing about the rain coming down to the land, we become part of that water that drops to the soil, that sinks into the soil. We see the particles of the soil, those tiny pieces become huge rocks. We see them, we see them as we go down, inside the soil and then deep in, we see the roots of the trees as we pass through. We fall in between, we seep into the soil, down past the roots, past worms in the soil, the creatures and bugs, we travel down to the underground water and travel with the flood, out to the river, into the currents, down to the sea. We travel past different lands. Waters and currents speak to each other. One might be Dhuwa and one might be Yirritja. ‘Don’t collide with me,’ we might say, ‘I am just passing through.’
That is why people become so emotional. Even if we don’t go back to that Country for a long time, we become so emotional we just cry. This is how Yolŋu think. This is how it has been passed on for so long. It is a whole way to be.
And it all depends on the particular Country, where we are doing it. We can’t just write it down. We have shared some songspirals here, some layers, put some things in words. But it is beyond words really. Don’t think what we have shared only exists here on the page. It does not. It lives. It has to be what the land tells us. What animals are there, in a particular land. The totems. The trees. The birds. The bush. The water. The rocks and all. We have thousands of songspirals. From the tiniest of things to the biggest of things, everything in the world.
And this milkarri we share with you is shared out of love, for our children, our grandchildren and for all. We are sharing our women’s wisdom of Country through songlines. We ask you to respect this knowledge, to be respectful and be aware of the limits of what we are sharing.
When the court failed to recognise Yolŋu land rights, it was because they said we didn’t have their kind of agriculture or fences or anything that they could see or recognise as using our land. We don’t use the land, not in that way; we sing the land so that new trees grow, new plants come, animals flourish. We build our fish traps, we hunt and dig, we nourish our ganguri, our yams, and they nourish us; fire shapes Country, we light the land to renew it. It is sustainable for Yolŋu and everything to live there together. With our songspirals the land renews itself, our songspirals are our land rights. After that land case a lot of our old people were so saddened by what the court said—that this was not their land—that it killed them. For us, for the new generations, we feel it is time that the stories we are telling in this book must be told. So ŋäpaki can start to understand why we don’t want our land to be devastated by destructive mining, digging, farming, putting poison on the land. This book is dedicated to our grandfather, who was such a strong man and who worked so hard to communicate to ŋäpaki what we are explaining with this book, even though English was his fourth or fifth language. Our grandfather gave his paintings to ŋäpaki visitors but got nothing in return. ‘This is my story and this is my painting, take it with you,’ he said, sharing the depth of our connection with Country. He shared his story, expecting something for it in return, respect, recognition of our rights, but he got nothing. Many ŋäpaki couldn’t or wouldn’t understand. Now maybe they will.
Weaving our spirals. (Authors’ collection)
Our book started with the Whale Songspiral and ended with Goŋ-gurtha. We spiral back to where we started.
We are carried out to the far horizon. We are Wuymirri, the Whale. The whale is our grandmother, our backbone, our present, our future, our past. We head to our final destination.
We breathe and our waterspout forms a small cloud. On the horizon it ascends and becomes the cloud Wulpundu. We head eastwards, towards the deep ocean, to where the rains come from.
The hunter, he sees the clouds formed by our waterspouts. He makes his harpoon straight and ready. He knows. He travels west. He sees the clouds rising, the little clouds that float above the horizon. He gets his paddle ready and stands with it, hands above his head. We are him. He is the cloud.
Our book is a spiral, showing how we are connected. It shows how the songspirals link us through time and place, and bring those times and places together, the land and the people. The spiral is infinite, it is how kinship spirals through the generations, from before and into the future. It is all connected.
In Goŋ-gurtha, we catch the big sea creature. Our catch might be the dugong. It might be the whale, a whale that travels across the calm mercurial waters.
As Goŋ-gurtha, we are the hunter with their deep knowledge, listening to Country to know where to go, what to do. We value that knowledge. The knowledge feeds us. We light the fire and the smoke tells all that we are successful on our journey. The clouds of smoke rise to the horizon.
In Wuymirri, we are the whale. It is our mother’s journey, as she passes away from us. We swim together across the mercurial ocean, to our final destination. You remember our pain when she got ready to be taken by the hunter? The pain as she passed?
The whales travel to another songspiral, connect with other clans. That’s where they cut her up properly. The Warramirri, they cut Wuymirri up very, very carefully.
But did you realise, did you see? There are tears in our eyes. This is milkarri. Let loose your grief. The whale that the hunters catch, that the expert hunters worked so hard to get, the joy and pride we feel? They caught the same whale.
Our mother, her final destination.
This is the understanding we share with you. The hunter catches the whale. We are both hunter and whale. We light the fire of celebration. We cry in grief at the clouds of smoke that rise to the horizon.
The hunters go hunting because they know, they can feel it. And when the hunter spears the whale, she will be cut up carefully and she will feed many. We will share her. Many people will share, this group, that group.
We can see the salt water carrying us. We move together with the current towards the shimmering horizon. We dive deep. Deep. Our mother.
It is grief. It is pain. It is joy, love, healing.
It is songspirals.
And for now, we are done. An evening breeze rises. The songspiral must be finished by the north wind, by dirrmala.
Wind is the one that cleanses, cleanses the footprints of the day. It smooths the sand, for a new beginning and a new song tomorrow. We can only do so much. Our book doesn’t tell all, only a few of the layers. We light a fire on the beach. The heat radiant against our skin. The smoke cleansing, calling, sending those messages. Remember Goŋ-gurtha.
We always finish with the cleansing, smoking the spirits with fire. Both Yirritja and Dhuwa cleanse with smoking.
It is sunset, the day has ended. It is time to rest. The tide is coming in, dancing with the wind. When the sun sets, the north wind rises. We are the sunset. It is night-time.
And tomorrow, we cry the dawn.