In 1996, just before Christmas, Djarrwalkpuy Yunupingu boarded a plane on the remote Tiwi Islands destined for the Northern Territory's capital — a short hop across the Timor Sea.
NOTE: Djarrwalkpuy Yunupingu's family has given permission for his name and image to be used.
It was a familiar routine for the 39-year-old, who made semi-regular trips to Darwin to socialise with friends and buy groceries. On this day, high on his to-do list was picking up presents for his family and he was expected back on the island that afternoon.
"But he didn't make it back on that afternoon plane," his daughter, Priscilla Yunupingu, says.
His family watched and waited as planes touched down at Pirlangimpi airstrip, hoping they'd catch sight of him striding along the bush tarmac.
Standing six-feet tall, with a thin build and voluminous afro, Djarrwalkpuy was usually easy to spot.
But as the days wore on, and plane after plane of passengers disembarked, he was never among them.
"It turned into a week of my siblings waiting, and it turned into a month, and it turned into years, till we all, you know, the five of us, his kids, had children of our own," Priscilla says.
And so the whereabouts of the much-loved husband, father, sibling and son became a mystery — one that would stretch on for nearly 25 years.
A family's search for answers
Priscilla Yunupingu, now 42 years old with children and grandchildren of her own, believes it might have been 1994 when she last saw her father as she left for school in Cairns.
"He said goodbye, gave me and my sisters a hug, and I jumped on a plane," she says.
"We waved, and that's the last time I saw him."
Priscilla, who hails from a prodigious clan dynasty in Arnhem Land, was born in Darwin but has since lived all over the Northern Territory's Top End.
Wherever she went — from the city, to the Tiwis, to Elcho Island — she carried the question of where her father might be.
But the more times she asked the question, the more confusing the answers became.
"I was going asking around people and they said, 'your father has moved down to Katherine'," she says.
"And then these other family members from Arnhem Land would say, 'we've seen someone that might be your dad, but he's in Alice Springs'.
"They were saying that he was out and about in the desert."
The logical explanation, she thought, was her father had started up a new family. Perhaps he, by leaving his children and wife in the dark, was sparing their feelings.
"I assumed that he found someone, another lady that came into his life, and probably settled down and had a family and was living down in the Central Desert somewhere," Priscilla says.
She spent the following years waiting for her father to arrive in the Tiwi Islands with his new family "to see us, and to introduce us all".
"It was hard because we didn't know whether he was okay. Our thought was he probably wanted that [new] life," she says.
These rumours, and the cultural stigma which accompanied them, police have speculated, may have contributed to the family waiting years before formally reporting Djarrwalkpuy missing.
Djarrwalkpuy's journey
Djarrwalkpuy was born in the northeast Arnhem Land community of Yirrkala. He was the second eldest of 16 children.
Police say that one of his brothers, C Yunupingu, did not stop looking for him until his death in 2020.
"[He was] a great hunter," Priscilla says of her father. "Loved the bush life. He spent most of his upbringing, young-man time, being out bush."
Paulina Puruntatameri, Priscilla's mother who comes from the Tiwi Islands, met Djarrwalkpuy while they were both studying education at the Top End's Batchelor Institute.
He was studying to become a teacher and would go on to become a teacher's aide on Elcho Island and the Tiwis.
It was there they started a family and Djarrwalkpuy had all the fishing and hunting and work he wanted, Priscilla says.
It was a good life, but not without its challenges.
Alcohol often had a grip on her father, she says, particularly when he'd take off to the capital.
"It was part of his journey, drink, drink, drink, just living it rough in the bushland, like all the other Indigenous women and men that are living rough in Darwin," she says.
Over the years she'd watched as family members would leave on the morning plane with promises to return the same afternoon, only to disappear for days on end.
But not her father, not usually. "He was the person that got back on the plane."
A grim discovery
About three months after Djarrwalkpuy's disappearance, on March 24, 1997, a passerby walking along a scrubby trail near Darwin Airport noticed a body lying in a creek bed.
It was an Aboriginal man, of tall, slight build, who police said had likely been dead for up to five days.
Piecing together the evidence, detectives painted an unfortunate scene of misadventure.
In dense bushland just a stone's throw from where tourists were climbing into taxis at the arrivals gate, the man had tumbled into the rocky creek bed from an old pipe system, hit his head, and died from his injuries.
A coronial inquest the following year ruled out suspicious circumstances. It determined the man, who had not yet been identified, had died from a fall.
Evidence suggested alcohol had played a role, noting he was found in an area populated by long-grass bush camps where Aboriginal people from remote communities would often congregate over some drinks.
But long-grassers in surrounding camps hadn't been able to identify the deceased.
After a fruitless search for answers, despite what police say were extensive local inquiries, authorities classified the body as "unidentified skeletal remains".
A question mark hung over the body for almost a quarter of a century.
An unexpected breakthrough
In 2020, in a laboratory deep in Darwin's police headquarters, a team of forensic scientists hit upon a eureka moment.
The biologists had been reviewing all of the Northern Territory's unidentified remains, running them against a freshly updated database of missing persons.
When they arrived at the DNA sample of the remains found in 1997, two potential family matches popped up.
The findings were reported to NT Police Detective Sergeant Brendan McLinden in the Cold Case Unit.
He enlisted the help of Bettina Danganbarr, an Aboriginal Community Police Officer familiar with Arnhem Land communities, who did some digging and pulled out a few leads.
"From there, she was able to get a bit of a story from community members about a particular family who hadn't seen their father for some time," McLinden says.
The daughter of the missing man was Priscilla, whose number Bettina had in her phone.
"Priscilla happened to be staying in Darwin at the time … and we arranged to have a bit of a catch-up so that we could discuss her father and whether he was in fact a missing person," he says.
For Priscilla, the call was a beacon of hope.
"I'm sitting there like, 'oh yes, they must have found my dad'," she says.
When Priscilla walked into Darwin's police headquarters for the meeting, McLinden says he instantly recalled the tall, skinny build listed in the unidentified deceased's case file.
"She's quite a tall lady herself," he says. "And I thought, 'well, we might be on the money here'."
Priscilla confirmed her father was missing, completed a missing person's report, and provided her DNA.
"And then a week went by, and I got a call from Brendan saying I might have to come in," she says.
"One of my uncles drove me … that morning I was shaking like a leaf."
Inside the Berrimah police compound, McLinden made the Yolngu mother a coffee, got her comfortable, and prepared her for the revelation.
"Unfortunately, it wasn't the news that I wanted to hear," she says.
"The police missing person unit had my dad's remains for the last 24 years.
"I was crushed, because I was hoping they were going to wheel my old man out in a wheelchair."
The reality sunk in. The realisation that her children would never get to meet their grandfather. That she'd never get to hug her dad again, as she'd dreamed about for decades.
But as time passed, and as extended family were alerted to the discovery, another emotion took root.
"It was like relief, you know, closure for all of us," she says.
After decades spent inside a Darwin morgue, Djarrwalkpuy could now go home.
Renewed hope for others
There's now hope, with the new national DNA database in operation, that cases like Djarrwalkpuy's could become more than a one-off success story.
Jodie Ward is the program lead for the National DNA Program for Unidentified and Missing Persons, which began auditing Australia's unknown human remains in 2020.
She ascertained there to be more than 850 unidentified remains archived in forensic facilities across the country — some dating back decades — and more than 2,500 missing person files in Australia.
The question is, how many of them can be linked?
"Up until that point, we didn't really have an accurate account of the numbers of these cases," Ward says.
"With advancements in forensic technologies, and [now] a number of national databases, together those tools would allow us to search and match all of this biometric information from the unidentified remains and the missing persons at a national level.
"And this would be the first time that this has been done."
In Djarrwalkpuy's case, Ward says, the databases and DNA advancements meant Northern Territory scientists were "able to link the DNA profile from the relative with the DNA profile from the remains".
"We've now got new tools to apply to previously unsolvable cases," she says.
"So, there's a lot of hope now, for many of these cases that haven't been able to be resolved using the available techniques we did have here in Australia.
"But time is of the essence, because the DNA is degrading every day, so we can't wait forever."
A final farewell
In June this year, Djarrwalkpuy's family from across Arnhem Land and the Tiwi Islands, alongside friends like McLinden, came together at Darwin's charter airport terminal.
With gapan — ceremonial clay — streaked across their faces, they prepared to send Djarrwalkpuy's remains back to Yirrkala. In Arnhem Land, a traditional burial would follow.
Among the assembled family members, was Djarrwalkpuy's cousin, Jennifer Baker, by Priscilla's side.
"Finally, today is the day that we take him home," Jennifer said at the time.
"We are putting closure to this, and we are taking him home to rest in peace.
"I'm finally glad that it's over and we did find him in the end.
"And his family never stopped looking."
With Djarrwalkpuy found and farewelled, his family finally have some answers. But questions remain over exactly what his final few months were like.
How can a young, fit man be found dead in a creek bed, with no known witnesses and nobody available to identify him?
For those that loved him, however, the most important part of the riddle has been solved.
The man who never made it home for Christmas, has finally returned.
