Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that the following story contains images and names of people who have died.

From the age of fifteen until his recent death at the age of seventy-four, the great Yolngu leader Yunupingu (1948–2023) was at the forefront of the struggle to change the Australian legal system in unprecedented ways. In 1963, with his father, Mungurrawuy, he drafted the Yirrkala Bark Petition, which presented to Parliament an eloquent claim for the rights of the Indigenous peoples of Arnhem Land before their country was, without their consent, turned into a bauxite mine. The Bark Petition was no ordinary document. On the one hand, it uses the antiquated language of a traditional ‘humble petition’ to Parliament, concluding in forms of speech that have hardly changed since the seventeenth century: ‘And your petitioners as in duty bound will ever pray.’

But two copies were presented to Parliament, the other in the language of the Yolngu. So, too, the typed petition is attached to a traditional Yolngu bark painting which represents the two clans most affected by the proposed mining activities, and which establish, according to Yolngu law, their legal ownership of the land. The document was an unprecedented act of cross-cultural imagination. In both form and content, it did not simply translate Aboriginal claims into the existing categories of Western law: it aimed to assert the independence and integrity of Indigenous law itself.