For ten years, the Garma Festival (www.garma.telstra.com) has brought people together at the tip of North-East Arnhem Land for a five day celebration of Yolngu art, music and culture.
The remote festival site, Gulkula, runs along the edge of an escarpment, with vistas across the Gulf of Carpentaria. Everyone at Garma camps out in tents under the shade of stringy bark trees. The fresh south easterly breeze, called the Dhimurru, breathes from across the ocean and rustles through dry leaves.
Garma is a festival that lives up to the high aspirations it has set itself: “Garma” is a Yolngu word meaning “both-ways learning”.
Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Jenny Macklin, officially launched Garma this year - and it was the first time in the event’s ten year history that an Indigenous Affairs minister had attended the event. Garma is an initiative of the Yothu Yindi Foundation (www.garma.telstra.com), and its key host is former Australian of the Year, Galarrwuy Yunipingu.
The central focus of each evening at Garma is the bunggul, a traditional dance event, supported by live music and story-telling, performed as a series of brief items. Dancers from communities across Arnhem Land perform in vibrant-coloured costumes and ochre body paint for an event that runs for several hours each day as the sun slowly sets.
The days at Garma offer a mix of activities. Some guests come specifically for the cultural tourism program - divided between men’s business and women’s business - to spending time with Yolngu elders. The women’s program has advanced significantly over the years and culminated in the Yolngu women opening the Healing Place (www.healingplace.com.au) on a quiet point at the edge of the Garma site.
The Healing Place is a respite centre where Yolngu healers use traditional medicines and holistic healing techniques. Earlier this year, the women opened their doors for three day retreats for non-Indigenous guests, in a move towards “healing tourism”, and as a way to preserve and share knowledge of traditional healing systems.
Other guests come to Garma specifically for the Key Academic Forum (www.cdu.edu.au) which brings together some of the country’s top intellectuals to discuss issues faced by Indigenous cultures. This year’s international keynote speaker was Sir Tipene O’Regan, an eminent Maori treaty negotiator, who spoke of the importance of a first class education for Indigenous students.
The forum theme for 2008 was “Indigenous Knowledge: Caring for Culture and Country” (www.garma.telstra.com). There were some definitional challenges to the topic – such as “what is culture?” - and fierce academic debate arose about the purpose and future of the nation’s largest Indigenous employment program (CDEP).
Students from across Arnhem Land travel to Garma to participate in youth forums and workshops or to battle it out in the school bands competition, with performances held every lunch hour.
The winning band was from Alyangula in Groote Eylandt – and their prize was to kick off the show on the main stage on the Sunday night of the festival. The band was joined on the stage by prominent Australian musician Ben Lee, who had been working with the students in workshops over the weekend. Later Lee performed his single “We’re all in this together” in a line up that included Australian hip hop act Morganics, country-music legend Jimmy Little and crowd favourite Saltwater Band from Elcho Island.
The Telstra Foundation's support of the Garma festival was also seen in the Yuta Yolgnu program with $240,000 provided over three years.
Yuta Yolngu helps students at the festival develop their multimedia skills, and helps them record their own ceremony, dance and music traditions.
Garma has a strong tradition of attracting Australia’s top musicians and in the past has hosted John Butler, Xavier Rudd and Midnight Oil.
On other nights, entertainment included short film screenings, star gazing with the Gove Amateur Astronomical Society or a walk through the magical Gapan Art Gallery.
The gallery is in a beautiful natural setting, you get there by following a candle-lit pathway into the dark forest, before bursting into a clearing of light and colour. Contemporary, brightly-coloured prints hang on white-painted tree-trunks, each individually lit.
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Photography © Yothu Yindi Foundation / Garma Festival