A walk along Tuffin Road is a walk through both the past and the present of Yirrkala, a small Northern Territory town perched on the edge of Australia.
You pass the football oval, the art centre, the church, houses from the mission days, all ringed by red dirt, before reaching the crystal clear waters of the beach.
I grew up in a beautiful house on Tuffin Road, looking out on the Arafura Sea.
Most people in this town are Yolŋu, the Aboriginal people of North East Arnhem Land.
My mum is Yolŋu. My dad is white. And that makes me: me.
Yirrkala, a mission town
For tens of thousands of years, the Yolŋu people were living out on their homelands, all around the North East Arnhem Land region. There's about 20 homelands — each holds the identity of a Yolŋu clan.
Then in the 1930s, the Methodist Church of Australasia set up a mission at Yirrkala and a community formed around it.
The Yolŋu were very accommodating, even though people like my family were basically treated like slaves.
My grandmother, Dhopiya Yunupiŋu, is from the famous Yunupiŋu family, which includes Dr M Yunupiŋu from the band Yothu Yindi and Galarrwuy Yunupiŋu, the land rights leader.
Dhopiya grew up during the mission days. She vividly remembers the leader of the mission, and the man who my street was named after, Douglas Tuffin.
"He was a friendly, very tough man … We still think about him all the time," she tells me.
The old people share some good memories of the mission days, even though hearing their stories now, it sounds like they had such hard lives.
'We are very strong people'
My mum, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, was born in Muṉumbal.
"[I was born] in one of those little pockets of rainforests that still exist today called [Muṉumbal], which is just across from Melville Bay — just born in the bush there," she tells me.
Today, she's principal of the Yirrkala School, which she calls "quite unique in its own way".
"It is a bilingual school. That's what the elders wanted — to have a school where two languages [Yolŋu Matha and English] are being taught, equally. The students learning both ways."
Also, here in Yirrkala, we learn through everyone. Everyone is a parent, a leader, a teacher for any baby that grows up in a Yolŋu community.
I ask Mum how she'd describe the Yolŋu to people who don't know much about them.
"We are very strong people. We are strong in our culture, and strong in our language."
She goes on to talk about Gurruṯu — a kinship system of the Yolŋu which means "we're related to every person in North East Arnhem Land".
"[And] we still have our songs, we have our stories, we know every contour of every beach and land, and what they're called. I think we are very lucky people."
She says after tens of thousands of years, Yolŋu culture has been taken over by the laws and systems of the Balanda, or the non-Indigenous people. But Yolŋu ways continue.
"So to balance two worlds is very, very clever, actually."
Talking to the land
With our kinship system of Gurruṯu, everyone's closely related to everyone else. So there's always people coming in and out of your house, people coming to get food or water or clothes.
And we go hunting every weekend.
"We get a lot of things from the sea and from the land. Whatever is in season. Yolŋu people are seasonal people. We eat what the season, what the flowers, tell us what to gather," Mum says.
"The land and the Yolŋu talk to each other."
On Saturdays and Sundays, it's time to go out bush. Everyone wants to go hunting. Everyone piles into the car. My aunties, uncles, grandmothers, brothers and sisters, and all their children.
Or as my Märi (Grandmother) Dela puts it: "Connected. All, each other".
An art centre that's a town centre
Yirrkala is a small community of around 800 people, but these people are always out and about.
Every day, people come from their houses, they come to the town centre where we have our community store, our football oval, our basketball courts and our art centre.
The Buku-Larrnggay Mulka art centre is a really central place that everyone comes to just be, to exist.
It has also played an important role in my life.
My dad, Will Stubbs, once lived in a very different part of the country.
"I was working as a criminal lawyer in Sydney for five years. And then I burnt my suit and took off to the bush. I found myself in Darwin in 1990," he says.
In Darwin, he got a job at the Northern Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service, where, he says, "I was part of a bush court system, so we'd go to different bush courts, as they were called, every month".
That's how he came to Yirrkala in 1991 which he soon realised "was a pretty special part of the world".
"I randomly met your mother and fell in love with her."
This random meeting happened at the funeral of Roy Marika — my mum's father figure and the man who's considered the father of Australian Indigenous land rights.
Mum and Dad got married in the Yirrkala church in 1994. Soon after, Dad got a job at the art centre.
"[The Buku-Larrnggay Mulka art centre] tries to negotiate the gap between the fact that the Yolŋu are an extremely spiritual people — their art is not just decoration — and negotiate that arrangement with the industrial world, which is all about hierarchy, judgement and money," he says.
"One of the differences between an industrial way of seeing things and an Indigenous way of seeing things is that everyone is an artist in the Indigenous world. So everyone has the right, and the capacity, to make art."
"Every single Yolŋu person in North East Arnhem Land is potentially an artist. And most weeks we'll get someone who's never made art before, coming in [to create art]."
Documents of our culture
Inside the art centre, there are some important pieces of history.
When the missionaries came in the 1930s, they thought that they had something to teach the Yolŋu.
But the truth was that we had something to offer back to them too.
We had our stories.
So we let them teach us about this new book, the Bible. But we decided to paint our knowledge on two panels and hang them up in the church, because that was our knowledge.
With that, the Yirrkala Church Panels were created — two huge panels which tell Yolŋu creation stories.
But when a new Methodist minister came in, he said, 'this is the work of the devil. They can't be in the church'.
So they were put at the back of the church where they rotted for decades.
But in the 1990s, a special space was opened in the art centre where they hang now as very important documents of our culture.
Made of Tuffin Road
Tilisa Manu is an old school friend of mine.
At school, we were both in a band called A-Plus. Everyone in the band had a history link to Tuffin Road.
"[My parents] first arrived in Australia as missionaries. My mum would always say 'all the Yirrkala families are just so welcoming'," Tilisa says.
"My dad told me just a few months ago, he never wants to leave because of how happy he is in Yirrkala."
She recalls growing up on Tuffin Road, sitting on the veranda and looking out to sea. "There was nothing better than just staring at something so beautiful".
As for me, I still think I am made of Tuffin Road — the mixture of different people and their histories.
I've always known that I have two sides. And both are as important as each other.
I know that my Yolŋu side is so powerful, because it's been here for thousands of years and it's a result of powerful people resisting and also just living.
I know that my grandfather, my dad's dad, has evidence of convict heritage. So I'm a result of that as well.
These are the people that made me who I am today and I wouldn't change that for the world.
RN in your inbox
Get more stories that go beyond the news cycle with our weekly newsletter.
