Every August, two thousand people visit northern Australia’s Gove Peninsula in Arnhem Land to attend the Garma Festival, an international celebration of the Aboriginal culture that is still strong around Yirkalla. In August, we travelled to Garma to interview indigenous leaders and film the dances that take place at sunset every evening.

The evening dance is known as the bunggul and the place the dances are performed is remembered as the origin place of the digeridoo, known in the local Yolnu language as the yidaki. In this short film clip you will hear a song to the Mimih Spirits, sung by Crusoe Kurddal, one of the lead actors in the film “Ten Canoes.” You’ll see the Red Flag Dance that recalls the Macassan seafarers’ visits to Australia, and you’ll meet yidaki master Djalu and his wife Darngul.

To visit Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, outsiders need a permit. This is Aboriginal land, one of the few places left where native people control access to land they have inhabited for millenia. Australian legislators have been trying to abolish the permit system and undermine Aboriginal Land Rights. The federal government also recently declared the equivalent of martial law in the Northern Territory under the pretense of trying to stop child abuse, which the government claims is higher in Aboriginal communities than elsewhere. Local observers point out that rural communities share this problem the world over and theorize that this is a pre-election ploy by conservative Prime Minister John Howard, who is trying to rally his base in the runup to national elections. In any event, Aboriginal leaders are fighting these measures, and when they gathered in August these government actions were at the top of their agenda.

Manduwuy Yunupingu, leader of the band Yothu Yindi, opened the Garma Festival with these observations: “This government is a worrying government. It worries about itself. The corporate sponsors worry. In the Northern Territory we are about to be dispossessed of everything we have left from the last dispossession — dispossessed of what is left — of land, lives, children, health, education. The name is ‘mainstreaming.’ The name is ‘assimilation.’ Some of us are not enjoying this festival because we are worrying ourselves sick about the Northern Territory government’s agenda. We must stand up and fight the sickness of this government setting out to take away what is rightfully ours. It’s going to be bigger than anything in the past. Maybe this is the final, final. We represent the past of Australia. We’ve lived here for thousands and thousands of years. We have survived all sorts of droughts, weather, wars. We never set out to kill ourselves and wipe ourselves out. We set out to take care of this country. Aboriginal people want to survive, so we can share land and knowledge, so your family and mine can live together and build a better world. It works with dialogue. You must talk and reach settlement, so life continues in balance.”

In that spirit we offer this short film clip of the 2007 Garma Festival.

The situation for many of Australia’s Aboriginal people is bleak, after two hundred years of land theft and racist oppression.

Visiting the artist Bardayal Nadjamerrek in the small, growing community of Kabulwarnamyu, in the heart of Arnhem Land, was like a breath of fresh air. “Lofty” — as he’s known throughout Australia — and his family were drawn away from the savannah plateau to coastal missions in the 1920s, but the wise elder has returned as part of the Outstation Movement to live off the land in an alcohol-free environment. The de-populated land became overgrown and huge wildfires raged in recent years. Lofty and his community are now managing the land, doing controlled burns in the early dry season, and gaining recognition nationwide for their visionary efforts.

Peter Cooke helps manage the community fire regime and is working on setting up a formal Indigenous Protected Area, or IPA.

As we planned our filming, I asked Peter about sacred sites we might film and he said: “Some places in the landscape have powerful forces, are dangerous, are where people do things that increase the species or resources or whatever they value. But there aren’t any non-sacred places. The whole landscape is imbued with spirit of ancestors. We don’t really focus on specific places. It is a sentient landscape where people call out to ancestors and spirits. So, how do you manage land that people think about this way, where living people interact with ancestors? There are places like that in Lofty’s country. Some of those places he doesn’t like taking visitors to. Some are secret and some are not. There are many classes. But ’sacred sites’ is a western gloss that we put on a differentiated nature.”

Leaving Sydney, we paid our respects to the Rainbow Serpent one last time, and bowed to Lofty’s huge, beautiful painting, which watches over airport travelers and their baggage as they come and go from Oz.