Garma Festival

Heralded by the rhythmic crack of bilma (ironwood clapsticks) and the droning call of the yidaki (didgeridoo), the voices of the songmen and the stamping feet of Yolngu dancers, Yothu Yindi Foundation chairman Galarrwuy Yunupingu AM opened the 3rd annual Garma Festival of Traditional Culture at Gulkula this afternoon.

In his opening address, Galarrwuy welcomed guests to the site and the Garma Festival, saying it was "once again a gathering for a purpose known to all of us and expectations are running high. Garma provides us all with an opportunity to learn.

Galarrwuy talked of Garma in terms of mortuary ceremony and discussed the spirituality of the site and its association with the creator hero Ganbulabula who invoked thee clans to stop squabbling and come together to learn from each other.

"Ganbulbula oversees the process of learning here. We want to make things as simple as possible. Garma is the gateway to knowledge. All of us come here with that great expectation.

"It is a resource. This is a time to sit and look and see what is happening next. The exciting thing is that we are all meeting here, people from many different countries are gathered here to learn."

Dancers from the remote Arnhem Land homelands communities of Yilpara and Gangan, some painted up with designs representing bush yams associated with the site at Gulkula, presented a series of traditional bunggul (dances) that have been passed down over thousands of generations.

Garma Philosophy

Mandawuy Yunupingu and Helen Verran, a philosopher from Melbourne University held a discussion today on the philosophy of Garma. Garma is many things – including a place – an open forum where the ancestral histories of different Yolngu groups can be renegotiated, celebrated and performed for a public audience. But garma is more than that. It implies a philosophy of negotiated knowledge, which has been used by Yolngu elders as a metaphor for the production of knowledge in diverse settings – for example education and scientific research – especially between indigenous knowledges, and those of the wider Australian community. It is only through the negotiation of different perspectives that a rich truth can be achieved.

"Every day of your life you can be practising garma," said Mandawuy. "When I‘m thinking, I’m thinking garma, when I’m talking, I’m talking garma, we can’t isolate where our beginnings are. Garma informs me of ways of putting things into a perspective that other people can adjust to without any problems. Which is why the Garma festival can allow for that feeling to take place, for what healing can take place, for whatever people may want to think about – whether it’s physically or spiritually or whatever. That’s what garma is all about, it’s the source of the knowledge system."

Larrakitj

In Yolngu tradition, hollow logs are painted with sacred ancestral designs, as ‘coffins’ or repositories of the bones of people who have passed away. The Yirritja hollow log, Larrakitj, is a significant part of the story of Ganbulapula, the Gumatj ancestor who instituted the Garma at Gulkula where the Garma festival is held annually. The Buku-larrnggay Arts centre from Yirrkala, the local Aboriginal community, commissioned the production of around 40 hollow logs, and these have been lent to the Yothu Yindi Foundation for display at this year’s Garma festival. They have been placed among the stringybark trees on a high ridge overlooking Cape Arnhem, and can be visited by guests at the festival. Melbourne University students have made a pathway along the escarpment from the festival area to the Larrakitj site.