Yunupiŋu was 15 years old when the Yirrkala Bark Petitions – or Ṉäku Dhäruk in the Yolŋu language – were sent to Canberra from his home in north-east Arnhem Land and presented to the House of Representatives in August 1963. The “petitions” sought parliamentary intervention after the Menzies government excised a portion of the Arnhem Land Reserve and covertly issued licences to a French company to mine bauxite on Yolŋu land. The text of the petitions was typed in English and Yolŋu matha (language) and stuck on to stringy-bark frames painted with the traditional signs and symbols that, if you knew how to read them, proclaimed Yolŋu sovereignty.
Though a precocious student at the Yirrkala Methodist mission school, Yunupiŋu was deemed too young to be a signatory by the clan elders, including his father, Mungurruway. That task was appointed by the ŋärra – Yolŋu parliament – to nine men and three women between the age of 18 and 36, literate representatives of the 17 clans of the Yolŋu nation who were sending their bark emissaries to the federal capital of the Australian nation.
