The Yolngu or Yolŋu (IPA: [ˈjuːlŋʊ] or [ˈjuːŋuːl]) are an aggregation of Aboriginal Australian people inhabiting north-eastern Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia.

The ethnonym Murrgin gained currency after its extensive use in a book by the American anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner,[1] whose study of the Yolngu, A Black Civilization: a Social Study of an Australian Tribe (1937) quickly assumed the status of an ethnographical classic, considered by R. Lauriston Sharp the "first adequately rounded out descriptive picture of an Australian Aboriginal community.

The proper transliteration of the word was, in any case, Muraŋin, meaning "shovel-nosed spear folk", an expression appropriate to western[3] peripheral tribes, such as the Rembarrnga of the general area Warner described.

[a] For Tindale, following recent linguistic studies, the eastern Arnhem Land tribes constituting the Yolngu lacked the standard tribal structures evidenced elsewhere in Aboriginal Australia, in comprising several distinct socio-linguistic realities in an otherwise integral cultural continuum.

[8] Yolngu comprise several distinct groups, differentiated by the languages and dialects they speak, but generally sharing overall similarities in the ritual life and hunter-gathering economic and cultural lifestyles in the territory of eastern Arnhem land.

[9] Specialists are undecided, for example, whether the languages spoken by the Yolngu amount to five or eight, and one survey arrived at eleven distinct "dialect" groups.

Children take their father's moiety, meaning that if a man or woman is Dhuwa, their mother will be Yirritja (and vice versa).

[11] Kinship relations are also mapped onto the lands owned by the Yolŋu through their hereditary estates – so almost everything is either Yirritja or Dhuwa – every fish, stone, river, etc., belongs to one or the other moiety.

The term yothu-yindi (after which the band takes its name) literally means child-big (one), and describes the special relationship between a person and their mother's moiety (the opposite to their own).

[11] The moiety-based kinship of the Yolngu does not map in a straightforward way to the notion of the nuclear family, which makes accurate standardised reporting of households and relationships difficult, for example in the census.

[11] Polygamy is a normal part of Yolngu life: one man was known to have 29 wives, a record exceed only by polygamous arrangements among the Tiwi.

Sacred objects and certain designs are also associated with certain Wangarr, who also gave that clan their language, law, paintings, songs, dances, ceremonies and creation stories.

They made yearly visits to harvest trepang and pearls, paying Yolŋu in kind with goods such as knives, metal, canoes, tobacco and pipes.

In 1906, the South Australian Government did not renew the Makassans' permit to harvest trepang, and the disruption caused economic losses for the regional Yolŋu economy.

[citation needed] Yolŋu oral histories and the Djanggawul myths preserve accounts of a Baijini people, who are said to have preceded the Makassan.

These Baijini have been variously interpreted by modern researchers as a different group of (presumably, Southeast Asian) visitors to Australia who may have visited Arnhem Land before the Makassans,[30] as a mythological reflection of the experiences of some Yolŋu people who have travelled to Sulawesi with the Macassans and came back,[31] or perhaps as traders from China.

[citation needed] Yolŋu had known about Europeans before the arrival of British in Australia through their contact with Macassan traders, which probably began around the sixteenth century.

[34] In 1883, the explorer David Lindsay was the first colonial white to penetrate Yolngu lands for the purposes of making a survey of its resources and prospects.

[35] In 1884, 10,000 square miles (26,000 km2) of Arnhem Land was sold by the colonial British government to cattle grazier, John Arthur Macartney.

[41] Monsoonal flooding, disease and the strong resistance from the local Aboriginal population resulted in Florida Station being abandoned by Macartney in 1893.

Yolngu men testified that their actions arose in response to the abuse of their women and to thrashings and firing on them by the Japanese crew.

Only the intervention of missionaries, who had a foothold on the fringes of this area, and of the anthropologist Donald Thomson, who led a groundswell of indignation at the travesty of justice, averted an official reprisal designed to "teach the wild blacks a lesson.

In 1941, during World War II, Thomson persuaded the Australian Army to establish a Special Reconnaissance Unit (NTSRU) of Yolŋu men to help repel Japanese raids on Australia's northern coastline (classified as top secret at the time).

In 1963, provoked by a unilateral government decision to excise a part of their land for a bauxite mine, Yolngu at Yirrkala sent to the Australian House of Representatives a petition on bark.

The bark petition attracted national and international attention and now hangs in Parliament House, Canberra as a testament to the Yolngu role in the birth of the land rights movement.

Yolngu lost the case because Australian courts were still bound to follow the terra nullius principle, which did not allow for the recognition of any prior rights to land to Indigenous people at the time of colonisation.

[47] The song "Treaty", by Yothu Yindi, which became an international hit in 1989, arose as a remonstration over the tardiness of the Hawke government in enacting promises to deal with Aboriginal land rights, and made a powerful pleas for respect for Yolngu culture, territory and Law.