Our connection to our homeland runs through us. Connections make us who we are. As we begin gathering the clouds, we walk, yearning for and thinking of our homeland. It is alive in us. It is a matter of belonging but it is more. It is our being and our longing. We yearn for our homelands, we are connected to them through gurrutu, through kinship. Gurrutu is the way we are related to one another and to everything.
Songspirals are expressions of gurrutu, they cycle out like the generations, like the family connections and kinship relationships that bind us all together, as Yolŋu and with Country. As the clouds gather and we walk together with our place, we are living our relationships.
We gathered, for this is our land, our place. We long for the land and the land longs for us. It wants to be with the person who walks. The frisson of connection, of the land and the person’s co-becoming, it holds them together. It is the raki, the string. When there is no one there on the land it grows uncared for. Everything overgrows because you don’t look after it, you don’t burn it, you don’t hunt on it to make a balance. So things get overgrown, they get out of balance.
For us, we balance as we care for Country and it cares for us. But we are not separate from it. We are in kinship with it. This kinship, gurrutu, underpins who we are. It is between us Yolŋu, with each other and the land and all its beings.
We think about our land and we think about our clan, we are Dhä-malamirr. Dhä means mouth, malamirr means blood. When we prepare namal, the stingray that is hunted, we mix the uncooked liver with the stingray meat. The body of the namal is the mother and the liver is the child. We mix it and make it into fish balls and then we share with family and we eat it. It is delicious! It connects us to the stingray and with our family as we share and give and take. It is our very being, our belonging, our kinship. This is us, Dhä-malamirr, we are named for the stingray and its blood that we eat. We feel it and we know it, in our mind, in our heart, in our soul.
As we begin gathering the clouds, we first come to Rorruwuy. We walk, yearning, longing, loving, thinking of our homeland. The Dätiwuy and Ŋaymil people come to meet, walking along the road, following the footpath, walking towards our place and thinking about our place.
Together the Dätiwuy and Ŋaymil clans and their estates (smaller areas within the clan’s Country: Bulkuwu, Nambatjŋu or Girriwala for Ŋaymil, and Wutjawuy or Gulŋapuy for Dätiwuy) make the Gapiny-mala. During the Gathering of the Clouds, they are one, they are the people that represent the rain, the ones who represent the Thunderman, together. In the songspiral, when a Dätiwuy man or woman is dancing and singing, the estate names above are named. They use these names to tell more specifically where they come from, or where they are going. We are all part of Gapiny-mala but when we part, we go into these smaller groups, different estates.
As we walk, we turn our head from side to side, looking for and thinking of our place. We are attending to what is there, to the beings and belongings of Country, to our kin, to our land. The person walks and looks around the area, the environment, the Country, the beings there, head turning from side to side with joy.
One time, we were at Sarah’s house, down south, talking about this songspiral. Banbapuy, and her gaminyarr Dharrpawuy, and Sarah, and Sarah’s daughter, Dawu, walked together to take Dawu to school. We walked, looking at the apple trees; we noticed the blossoms coming (there will be apples this year!), and we saw the oranges were nearly finished, the cockatoos had eaten the seeds from all but the stringiest ones. We noticed the birds, the dew, the warming sun, the cycles, the land, with joy, with happiness, with a happy heart, and with respect. This is the songspiral. It is walking, head turning, looking, noticing, thinking as we watch the land, paying attention, with love. Walking in kinship.
Gurrutu, kinship, binds Yolŋu together with each other and the world. It is the pattern, the string, the raki, that binds us. It is so important to understand gurrutu, to understand songspirals and what they mean. Gurrutu is a fundamental mathematics, Yolŋu mathematics—a structure, a pattern—that places us in a network of relationship, of obligation and of care. It is our map. Through gurrutu we know how we are related. It makes the Yolŋu world. We are related as mother and daughter, as sister and aunty, as father, brother, great-uncle. This gurrutu is not only a blood relationship, but a place in a pattern of existence, a system of relationships. Gurrutu holds all to do with human beings, nature, land, sea, seasons. When it is really hot, people will say that is my waku-pulu, my child. When we see rain from the west, we know that is gurrutu, that is part of the pattern. We have many mothers, all of our birth mother’s sisters. It cycles through the generations, everyone fits, also ŋäpaki if they are adopted, looping to infinity and back, so that our great-granddaughter is our mother. That little girl could be a mother for you. This is fundamental to our beliefs.
When Banbapuy, Sarah, Dawu and Dharrpawuy walked Dawu to school, Dawu was in year two. She was seven years old. Banbapuy is a senior teacher, a grandmother. But Dawu is her aunty. We know that. We know our relationships and we know the obligations that go with them. And this is underpinned by Yirritja and Dhuwa, our moieties.
Everyone is connected. Everyone is connected through the raki, the string that ties us together through gurrutu. And it’s not just people. We are in relationship with place and with animals and all beings, including rocks and waters and winds. That’s the thing with Yolŋu and culture, everything is a whole, everything is one. We do our own djäma, work, for the self. But really we are one big living thing. And that’s why everyone goes through that same sorrow, crying, together.
The names given to our children can be from the salt water or the fresh water, from the rocks or the leaves, fruits, clouds, rain, animals, fish; everything that lies upon the ground, that grows upon the ground, that is in the sea, upon the sea, that is in the clouds and comes out from the clouds. A Yirritja child is named after Yirritja things, Dhuwa children are named after Dhuwa things.
Everything is sung in the songs: whether the rain is Yirritja rain or Dhuwa rain, which direction it came from, what season of the year it is. Is the rain soft and gentle, or hard and strong? Where does the water run to—does it run straight to the sea or to streams and then to the big rivers that finally lead to the ocean? Some of these names are given to a child.
Gurrutu tells us our relationship to the rock and the rain, the clouds and the homelands. It is how we know who we are, through our connections. We can’t exist outside gurrutu. It wouldn’t make sense. We know and can name our place through gurrutu. This is the place we hold in our mind and our heart as we walk.
We adopted Kate, Sarah and Sandie, who co-authored this book. We put them in a place. This means they are held by gurrutu now too, and their families, their children, their husbands, their parents. They have roles and they have responsibilities. We placed them in our pattern, so we would know where they fit.
When Banbapuy first met them she saw them sitting at our son Djäwa’s house. She said, ‘Who are those hippies?’
Djäwa turned around and said, ‘I don’t see any hippies. I see my family.’
We all have families, we all have children. And they are all key to making our work together happen. And why? Because one of the things is that we are all women. It can be mayhem sometimes, but in the end everyone feels good, everyone is satisfied. All our children, Yolŋu and ŋäpaki, are growing up together, knowing their gurrutu, where they fit. They all learn from each other. We are working for the universities to share our knowledge and provide something special for our Yolŋu children, so they grow up knowing about the universities, perhaps going to the university or working at the university in the future.
We are all in a journey together. We are part of a journey together. The books and all our times together form the footprints of our journey. We are family now.
We walk and it weaves the clouds. It’s the walking, the joy, the sound of us moving, the thinking of our place, the love. It’s in the attention too: we look around and we know what we see, we recognise and respect the beings, the feelings of Country. Everything comes to life.
Now as we walk, the sound of our walking goes up to the clouds. Our sounds, our voice, our footsteps, the sounds of our existence are woven into the clouds. We walk, we know that area. The birds start talking. It comes alive as we go. We are making sounds, the birds hear us. It is a welcoming. Our sound is called rirrakay.
We are singing the clouds and the chanting goes up, up, up, out of our mouths and up to the clouds. Like a vibration of our existence; talking to the clouds, singing to the clouds, sending our song to the clouds, because when they hear, the clouds gather.
The sound of the songspirals is the sound of the universe. We are in harmony with it, and by singing we sing our connections, our raki and our gurrutu. The world sings all the time. We sing and the clouds sing. The planets sing, the rain sings, the birds, the plants, the rocks, the tides sing, and we sing the world. The fish, animals and different beings, they sing in different ways, at different frequencies. Some songs take a long time. The world is alive with their sound. The world is their sound, and ours. This is the music of nature. Many people have forgotten how to listen.
The sound communicates who we are, our identity, and where our homeland is. If we are sick, our singing can bring the sick back into harmony. While the women are doing milkarri, the sick person listens and takes their memories back to that place. The place and the song are one. It’s soothing and healing. We go back to our homeland through the spirit, through song. We revisit memories, living our days through song.
If a sick person is going to pass away, milkarri makes them strong for death. It encourages them not to be scared because they know that they are strong and they know who they are and who their clan is. They are strong for other people, their kin. Milkarri connects the person, the songspiral, the place. Every time we see people who are sick and we go to the hospital and the doctor says they will pass away soon, we sing the song and we see them strong, not scared of death. It helps.
When a Dhuwa person who has shark as their totem is really sick, when it gets to that deep part of the song, their head turns from side to side. Their totem is the shark and so straight away we know, through the actions they do, we know they are going to go to that place, to Rinydjalŋu. This is a peaceful going because they are connected. They are the shark, and they are telling us they are going to go. It is the right way, the strong way, the way of gurrutu and of the songspirals.
Our sound goes to the clouds as we walk to our homeland. The clouds collect the sound, and later it will rain. In the ceremony, we sing the song, then another clan sings the song. It gathers in, and eventually it rains. Not yet, though. Now we are walking, our sound, our existence, everything comes to life; the laughter and joy of being home, coming home, it weaves up into the air, to the clouds.