Yirrkala

History

There has been an Aboriginal community at Yirrkala throughout recorded history, but the community increased enormously in size when Yirrkala mission was founded in 1935, with people from 13 different Yolngu clans moving to Yirrkala. Mission superintendents included founding superintendent Wilbur Chaseling, Harold Thornell, and Edgar Wells, who wrote about their experiences there. The residents were free to come and go as they wished, and the interaction was on the whole positive in those early days, with a lack of dogmatism by the missionaries, and the Yolngu people accommodating Christianity within a version of their own beliefs. Yirrkala played a pivotal role in the development of the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. In early 1963, clan elders came together to paint the Yirrkala Church Panels, which documented the Yolngu claim to the land through ancestral stories. Consisting of two sheets of masonite, eight elders of the Dhuwa moiety painted one sheet with their major ancestral narratives and clan designs, and eight elders of the Yirritja moiety painted the other sheet with Yirritja designs. A series of four petitions, attached to decorated bark panels, were created at the mission in 1963 and sent to the Federal Government to protest the Prime Minister's announcement that a parcel of their land was to be sold to a bauxite mining company. Although the petitions were unsuccessful in the sense that the bauxite mining at Nhulunbuy went ahead as planned, it alerted non-Indigenous Australians to the need for Indigenous representation in such decisions, and it prompted a government report recommending compensation payments, protection of sacred sites, creation of a permanent parliamentary standing committee to scrutinise developments at…

Most-observed species

• Bar-shouldered Dove

  Geopelia humeralis (Temminck, 1821) · Aves
  238
• Sulphur-crested Cockatoo

  Cacatua galerita (Latham, 1790) · Aves
  187
• Masked Lapwing

  Vanellus miles (Boddaert, 1783) · Aves
  162
• Rainbow Bee-eater

  Merops ornatus Latham, 1801 · Aves
  161
• Forest Kingfisher

  Todiramphus macleayii (Jardine & Selby, 1830) · Aves
  159
• Red-collared Lorikeet

  Trichoglossus rubritorquis Vigors & Horsfield, 1827 · Aves
  155
• White-gaped Honeyeater

  Stomiopera unicolor (Gould, 1843) · Aves
  155
• Peaceful Dove

  Geopelia placida Gould, 1844 · Aves
  152

Most recent

• M 4.1 — 2019-12-20
  62 km ESE of Galiwinku, Australia