The fire is burning from Goŋ-gurtha. The fire burns from the expert hunter. It burns over there. A journey has been completed. Marri’marri keened milkarri for the fire on the horizon. And here? Here we are beginning.
Rrawun describes the singing of the hunter, the hunter who is beginning a journey. Marri’marri keened, we have seen and smelled and felt the smoke rising. Now we begin from a different beginning. The men begin with the hunter. The hunter has many names: Wurramala, Wurrumila, Wuymu, Bäpa’yili, Goŋ-gurtha and more. Here Rrawun uses the name Wurrumila. Wurrumila is the name from the songspirals, the name of the Gumatj hunter.
First they must sing the shelter that the hunter is building there on the beach. This is where he begins. He’s building a shelter from a local tree, maybe it is a coconut tree, maybe a bamboo tree. When the shelter is finished he says, ‘This is my barrum barru.’
Every Gumatj person who passes away, if they’re living in a coastal area, there’s a special shelter for their body, and that’s called the barrum barru. The iron shelter we sit under at Bawaka, where we have shared many of the songspirals for this book, where we listen and watch and talk, that place had been the barrum barru for Laklak’s husband’s funeral.
The hunter starts in his mind. He is thinking where to go, where’s the best place to go to get dugong or whale. He is thinking of the area, gamata, the place of the sea grass, a place of dugong and whales, the big sea animals. That’s why the hunter, Wurrumila, is the man who provides the food. He feeds the family. He starts by sitting down and thinking, thinking where to go, planning the hunt.
The Goŋ-gurtha could be the hunter. It would be someone who knows the sea, knows the land, knows the places, the map of the country, the map of the sea. It’s a person who knows the area really, really well, someone really intelligent for the place. Even when it rains they know where to hide, what to do, how to make a shelter. They know the reef, where it ends, where the dugong are hunted. They’re like pirates, pirates of the sea. Seafarers.
In the songspiral, we use different names for the hunter. We sing Djambatjŋu, the one who spears the dugong or whale. Djambatj means the person we can rely on to get something for us. They are experts in getting food, they are determined. We can rely on them. Even if the sea is rough, muddy, or it’s raining, the Djambatj knows where to get something. We can count on that person. Djambatj also means harpoon.
That’s why we named Bambuŋ, Merrkiyawuy’s son, Djambatj, because he always gets something. Even if it’s raining, high tide, he brings something home. He has the stubbornness—‘I’m the hunter, I have to get something.’ It’s determination. Even if the Djambatj doesn’t bring back something big, they can bring back crabs, or a rock of oysters, something for the women.
Before the missionaries came, women and men had to provide for their family and children so the family wouldn’t starve—hunting, fishing and gathering yams, oysters, clams and other bush foods. That is why we have so many names for hunter. If you were Djambatj you were given another wife, because you were motivated and not lazy. A woman can’t marry a lazy man or they would both be dead. Djambatj knows the tide, knows the turtle, the dugong. This is not new, it’s been done for a long, long, long time. It’s very, very old Law. It’s been done a long time and it’s there in the new generations’ blood. The hunters know where the dugongs gather, where their territory is, their gamata.
We don’t catch a big animal like dugong or turtle to waste, we catch to share and eat. We are hunting for the family, hunting for the songspirals. Every part of the animal is labelled. All the parts on the dugong’s body are sung in the manikay. Each part has a name, even the juice of the dugong has a name. The position of the hunters in the canoe goes with the name of the parts of the animal. The captain gets the tail; the Djungaya, the caretaker of the ceremony, who is in the middle, gets the middle part; the person who steers gets the shoulders. The Djambatj only gets a tiny bit.
The people who go out with the hunter share. Part of what we are talking about here is sharing the dugong or the whale, but underneath is the importance of sharing as part of the Law. Sharing is not only dugong or whale, but it is what it means to be Yolŋu, how to look after Yolŋu, how to look after the homeland. With the Law we were taught to respect other people, to be honourable, to talk straight and to despise greed and envy. It’s been like that since the Law was laid down, passed down through the generations, and exactly the same things happen today.
In Goŋ-gurtha, we sing about the canoe. The canoe is on the land, beside the beach. Resting, waiting. The canoe is resting in the shade or somewhere, away from the water. Before the canoe can be put in the water, the hunter has to check it, to see if there are any holes or cracks. Checking it out. You can see it in the dance, hear it in the song. He is checking everything about that canoe.
After the hunter has checked the canoe, we sing about him making his harpoon, cutting the harpoon, the djambatj. Cutting a special tree. Sometimes they talk about bamboo in the songspiral.
Then we sing about the marrwala, the paddles. Wurrumila is a very knowledgeable and wise hunter so sometimes he puts ŋara’ on the paddles, a particular cloud pattern made by the smoke. The cloud pattern represents the cloud far beyond the surface of the sea. That cloud communicates, it is like a GPS.
When the cloud rises in the distance, it’s from the fire. It rises from a place where people are burning the land. Yes, a Goŋ-gurtha. When we see the fire we go, ‘Yaaah, the fire’s started from the Goŋ-gurtha, the hunter.’ When we see it, we know the Goŋ-gurtha has started the fire. The fire burns.
When we do that, we are also looking back at our mum Marri’marri who keens the fire. The two songspirals connect. They are one. And after Wurrumila has hunted, he will make a fire too, and then when others see the fire, they see someone has caught a dugong or whale there.
The hunter can read anything from the sea to the land. He owns the sea, the reef, this is his. It owns him too. Sometimes he makes the marrwala with a carving of dugong or jungle fowl. That is very sacred. For this songspiral, here in this book, it’s just a normal paddle, marrwala.
After the marrwala are finished we sing about the water, about the tide coming in and the tide going out. By the timing of the tides coming in and going out, the gunbilk marrawulwul, the calm glassy water, the hunter knows he is ready. He also knows from his feeling, gatjbu’yun, as he has sat and hoped.
Sometimes we sit and hope, gatjbu’yun, because we have run out of food and the wind is so big. There are waves, the water is murky, and sometimes we think, ‘Aaaah, I hope we’re going to get something for the family.’ And when we go hunting we always feel like we’re going to get something, and sometimes we get it.
Back in the early 1990s a category 2 cyclone came to this area from Groote Eylandt. Laklak, Merrkiyawuy, Rrawun, the old man, Batjaŋ, little Bawi and Nalkuma were staying at our house at Bawaka. We couldn’t get back to Yirrkala because of all the rain that comes before a cyclone. So we stayed there for maybe a week and we ran out of food. We only had rice, no milk, no tea, no anything. So the old man and Laklak said to Rrawun, Bawi and Nalkuma, ‘Okay, we want you boys to hunt and get turtle for us.’
It was all murky and rough. Rrawun remembers, ‘So we went to the other side of the bay and while we were there I was hoping, gatjbu’yun, and suddenly we saw a big turtle and we got him. We came back and that night, with the cyclone about to hit, we had that miyapunu. We cooked the miyapunu and put it inside out of the weather and that night and that morning the cyclone passed north of Bawaka.’
That miyapunu lasted maybe nine days. It was all cooked and safe to eat.
That cyclone reminded us of Wurrumila. We try to re-enact that Wurrumila. Our hunters learn from a young age, like that time with the cyclone. Wurrumila is an idol for our people, for everyone who lives in Arnhem Land. If you are like him you have his hope, his ability to hunt and act and feed the family. When we are growing up we have to learn how to catch everything to feed our family. We learn where to get water, where to get kangaroo, emu, oysters, bush foods, whatever.
It is so important that our children and our grandchildren learn. As they are growing up they listen, and then, when they are older, they learn, so they have knowledge that they will use. When they go hunting, they know what to get. So songspirals connect us through the generations, to our knowledge, to those that have come before and those yet to emerge. Our children are also keepers of the flame.
Djawundil remembers Laklak sitting down with Djawundil’s granddaughter, our little mother, Mawunymula. She was only six or seven. Laklak said, ‘What will happen if I die? Will you sing for me?’
‘Yes, waku, child, I will,’ said Mawunymula.
‘Show me.’
So Mawunymula sang Laklak going to get ganguri, yams, maypal, oysters. Straight away Mawunymula sang.
That’s how the children learn, sitting down with their mothers and their fathers, the grandparents, listening, talking about that Country. If there’s a story, there’s meaning behind that story. If there’s a song, there’s meaning behind the song. We don’t sing meaningless songs! Country, whales, everything that they do, have meanings. If the kids are all sitting down looking out to sea, then someone tells them the story, like how when they travel they will see whales.
It’s to do with the nurturing of oneself, one’s children, one’s parents. All our children—they are our wonder. We nurture them to take their wondrous minds even further. We nurture them to explore, touch, smell, taste. We take them outside, in the mud, get them to feel what’s in the mud, to go through the mangroves, walk on that beach of coral so their feet can feel what it’s like to walk on the earth. This is them learning, this is preparing them for university, for leadership, for business.
They are all Goŋ-gurtha, keepers of the flame. Like with Mayutu’s cultural group. After Merrkiyawuy gave them the name, Mayutu explained to the other students something about what Goŋ-gurtha means. She said, ‘Goŋ-gurtha meant literally, first, the flame in our hands. Then in the songlines, a lady holds the fire, up in the stars, in the galaxy, our galaxy, the Milky Way. It is the spiral. Up there are the Yirritja Gumatj sisters, Naynay and Guthaykuthay who light fires. They are the keepers and they light the fire. They keep the fire glowing all the time. Then I explained in the olden days there was only one person who was the keeper of the flame. When they moved, that person had to grab the stick from the embers and make the fire from the pandanus trunk, dry one, light it up and carry it to the next wäŋa, camp, and then from there, again.’
Her cultural group is made up of students from different backgrounds: Yolŋu, ŋäpaki, Māori, all the other cultures in the area at the high school in town. They started out doing a play that was written by two teachers at the school, Juran and Cameron, a couple from New Zealand and the Cook Islands, who feel passionate about the sharing of culture.
The play was about a Māori boy, Tama, and a Yolŋu girl, Dhayka, who didn’t have any respect for their culture. So the spirits made them travel. The spirits put them in Samoa. They were confused, disoriented. The boy and the girl, who was played by Mayutu, travelled and they watched the Samoan cultural dance and then they were dancing, they were singing. They walked off and went back onto the stage and they found themselves in a totally new culture. They learnt about this culture and they joined in: they went to Samoa, Papua New Guinea and many other places. They were so confused as to why they were made to go to these places. But through this journey they learnt a love for culture.
So, in this play, they start wondering. The boy wonders, what is my culture? I don’t know my culture. I know that I am Māori, but what is it? The music starts and his family comes in. They sing one of their songs to him. They say at the end, ‘Welcome home, Tama,’ and he remembers who he is. Then he says, ‘I must help Dhayka to find her culture.’ So in the end they come back to Arnhem Land and then her family starts singing ‘Dhayka’, a slang word for girl in Yolŋu matha to remind her of her language. In the end, the Yolŋu family adopt Tama and the two young people have found their culture. They have respect for people, for themselves. It is all better again. They know who they are. The culture is not going to be lost.
That is why the group is Goŋ-gurtha. The students meet and they talk about their cultures, learning and sharing, learning to value themselves and where they come from. A lot of those kids feel so happy to be in this group, they feel proud again. They know that it is their job to carry their culture on. As Mayutu says, ‘I make sure I will know my Country, talk about it, not hide it, open up my feelings about it. Our cultural group is like a family as well, like a big family.’
The fire burns from Goŋ-gurtha and from the determined hunter.
Wurrumila is reading the sea. The hunter can read, he can read everything, he can read nature. Like when we woke up this morning we thought about the tides and hunting. Straight away we think, ‘The tide’s going out, I could go hunting before the tide comes back.’ But sometimes the tide coming in is the right time to get a certain animal, like dugong or turtle.
He’s there, he’s waiting for the tide. The canoe is a long way from the water, so he’s waiting for the tide to come in. That’s what we do in the song too. Sometimes the Djungaya in a ceremony might say, ‘Wait, we have to sing the tides before we head off, before we go in the right direction.’ It must be in the right order.
So wise women and men, old people or even middle-aged or younger, they sit there and listen. These wise people sit next to younger people when they’re singing and listen and they correct them. They make sure they start and stop in the right places, correctly.
For the hunter, it is time to travel, time to go hunting.