Garma Festival

Garma? Is it a mistake to label ourselves, and begin our news of what's being planned with a word few of you will recognise? You might say we're exporting from Yolngu life -- again! We are giving the word Garma a wider circulation in contemporary Australian life, pulling some of its meanings and allusions into new cultural contexts.

Garma is pronounced with the ‘r’ sounding -- you push the word to the back of your mouth by rolling your tongue up. It doesn't stay up around your teeth like "charming" for example.

Perhaps beginning with an unfamiliar word is not a tactical mistake at all. Since what we aim to do with our Foundation is generate a new vision for what Australia might become, a new word or two along the way is neither here nor there. Garma implies balance. Balance between Australia's peoples; and balance between people and the environment. But balance here is taken as an outcome, the result of active striving. There's nothing passive about it.

Garma will soon be a new place for cultural studies in Australia. A place where Aboriginal Australians, white Australians, and those who visit Australia, can learn in a Yolngu Aboriginal cultural environment, and contribute to generating new meanings, new stories and pictures of ourselves and our times and places.

Mobilising a Place -- A Launching Event

Garma is the abstract idea of ‘a place from which cultural meanings flow’, but garmas also have particular locations. And the place for our garma is Dhupuma. This particular place has profound meanings in the Yolngu political and moral economy. One of these is expressed in the metaphor of honey. Dhupuma is a nexus, a beehive where distilled and rich meanings are generated. It is at Dhupuma that the Yothu Yindi Foundation plans to erect a building to house a Garma -- a place of learning for all Australians.

Helen Verran

Gulkula and Ganbulapula

This place where Dhupuma college was, is called Gulkula, or Dhupuma. Dhupuma is the name they gave to the college. It means to look up, because when the creator Ganbulapula came through this country, he was looking up into the stringybark trees, looking at the wild blossoms for sugarbag, wild honey.

Ganbulapula used to be a Gupapuyngu man, name Murayana. He killed a shark, his mother, and came running across the country, from place to place, changing his identity, from Gupapuyngu, to Liyalanmirri, to Dhalwangu, to Manggalili, to Munyuku, to Madarrpa, to Ritharrngu, to Guyamirrilili, to Warramiri, to Wangurri, to Lamamirri, to Gumatj, running through the bush, brushing the flies from his face as he hunted for honey.

When he arrived at the escarpment at a place called Datjala which overlooks Cape Arnhem, he used his yidaki to call a long note signalling to the spirits in all the surrounding areas, both Dhuwa and Yirritja. He called to the Dhanbul spirits Rirratjingu and Ngaymil, Galpu and other Dhuwa groups, who were performing their morning star ceremonies.

At Gulkula, he formed an open area, called yati, or a garma, for public ceremonials, for all the different Yirritja clans. And they gathered there together over the years, for ceremonies, especially for Yirritja mortuary ceremonies, where the bones of the deceased would be crushed and placed in hollow log coffin, and their spirits would be sent with a sacred string into the spirit world.

Even today, the Gumatj owners continue to call people together with the spiritual yidaki across the nation and the world, to come together in the spirit of garma. Using the old Yolngu ideas, the modern day spirits which come are exposed to a modern garma, where they come together to learn, to share and to develop ideas and celebrate together through art, through dancing, through radio, television, computers, internet, learning yidaki, learning about medicine, law, many different themes worked together.

Raymattja, Waymamba, Michael