Abstract
Amid troubling signs that ‘Indigenous ideology’ may be added to ‘gender ideology’ as a site for Australia’s version of so-called ‘woke culture wars’, there is a pressing need for more genuine education about what Indigenous law actually is. One source might be academic texts on the subject. But another, surprisingly, is a work of fiction – A Piece of Red Cloth: A novel from Arnhem Land, by Leonie Norrington, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Djawa Burarrwanga and Djawundil Maymuru (Allen & Unwin, 2025; 384 pages; $34.99 in paperback).
This is a novel written explicitly and closely about Aboriginal law, and very largely from an Indigenous perspective. It is also a historical novel, at least in the sense that it is about historical events, things that happened (or might have happened) long ago. But it is a misnomer, if it suggests the kind of work that springs from archival research, from reading books about historical periods or personalities, from speaking with or reading the work of recognised historians. No amount of academic research, no ordinary life experience, and no other Australian author, no matter how gifted or creative, could have written a work like this. The novel is, quite simply but accurately, unique.
The novel tells a story from a time before European colonisation of Australia, and before written records – a time known sketchily in some historical accounts, and thoroughly only in the oral history of the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land. At this time, Macassan traders sailed at the beginning of the Wet Season in their praus, with the prevailing winds and currents, from their islands in Indonesia, to trade trepang or turtle-shell with the Yolngu for iron and sometimes, alcohol or tobacco. They came for several hundred years, fought or made love or held ceremonies with the local people, and integrated themselves more thoroughly than most Europeans have ever done with the intricate kinship systems and looping, never-ending local tales. Occasionally, Yolngu made the journey the other way – willingly or perhaps kidnapped – to Sulawesi. Occasionally too, the Macassans broke the local laws – perhaps under the influence of the Dutch or Portuguese, who had colonised the Indonesian islands by the 1600s, or of the far-away Chinese, who prized the trepang as an aphrodisiac. When this happened, fighting broke out.
The novel tells the story of Garritji, a teenage Yolngu girl whose grandmother, Batjani, is trying to prepare her for the secret ceremonies of coming of age. At the same time, Batjani is trying to protect Garritji and her cousin-sister, Lingiyara, from something far more sinister – being sold off, or traded, to be raped or sexually enslaved by the rapacious and sexually perverse Macassan trader Agah Zayd. Batjani has strong grounds for this fear. This is exactly what had happened, the year before, to Garritji’s sister Marrdiwani, who is now spiritually dead, ‘dead inside’, the life gone from her eyes. Batjani suspects her brother-in-law, Waditju, of being involved in Marrdiwani’s rape – of selling her as part of a deal involving arrack, the Macassan liquor, which is threatening to poison relations between Macassans and the Yolngu, and upend traditional Law. Even more dangerously, she is beginning to suspect that her own husband Djoli, a good man who is also Waditju’s brother, of somehow being implicated in the awful events surrounding Marrdiwani, or at least of helping cover it up.
Lending emotional richness to this story is a cast of complex characters. There is Djapalitjarri, Garritji’s promised-husband, a young man already skilled in spiritual power, but who is haunted by his voyage to Makassar, a season or two before, and the spiritual corruption he had experienced there. There is Nakhoda Istarb, a traditional Macassan man, who had made many successful voyages to the Yolngu countries they call Marege, but whose authority is threatened by unscrupulous younger men. There is Nambatj, a senior elder and Yolngu lawman, who has great psychic power, making spiritual journeys through time and space, communicating with ancestors, but whose rigidity makes it hard for him to negotiate the changes the Macassans have wrought. Perhaps the most interesting character is Djoli – a man truly torn between loyalty to his Law, and to his wife Batjani, whom he loves, and on the other to his brother Waditju, whose dark schemes he finds himself fatally unable to betray.
And yet, even to describe the novel in these terms is to reduce it somehow to non-Indigenous frames of reference. The novel is an epistemological leap – a leap of the imagination into another world, another Law. It is complex. The names are unfamiliar. Even more, the relationships and kinship systems are unfamiliar, and depicted in all their complexity without the condescension of a glossary. The language of second-wife, sister-wife, cousin-sister is interwoven throughout the story without explanation, leaving the reader to work it out – or, just as likely, fail to work it out – for themselves. This is exactly how it would be if the reader were flung, in reality, into the Yolngu world.
Interwoven, too, are elements of a worldview which jars fundamentally with the secular, rationalist, liberal viewpoint likely reflexively possessed by most non-Indigenous readers. There are the psychic powers of the lawman Nambatj, for example, which enable him to speak with his ancient ancestor Tarritji, who was present when the first Macassans, known as the Lilambarri, arrived on Yolngu shores. There is the force-field, the continuous shield of energy created with song, which protects the Yolngu lands from Barbarian invasion, making them look desolate and uninhabitable, so that the foreign ships sail along the Yolngu shores, their crews unable to see land.
And there are statements, too, about Law, particularly the relations between men and women, which some non-Indigenous readers might find challenging. Discussing Marrdiwani’s rape, the women are overcome by a ‘defeated silence’, for [a]ll of them – beautiful and plain, old and young, clever or practical – are governed by their men. The Law protects them against violence or meanness, but they all must defer to their men’s decisions (p 92).
At the same time, as Old Lady Marrngitj says towards the end of the story, ‘Our Law forbids all abuse. There are clear dictates about who can hit a person and why. Rape is illegal. Always!’ (p 255).
But while so much is unfamiliar, its themes are universal and human, as much of the twenty-first century as of the late 1600s, when the novel is set. There are observations, such as that an abused woman, like an abused dingo, cannot be trusted. The husband’s fist is always in her mind, her fear so acute that she will sometimes endanger her own children to keep herself safe (p 194).
There is the conflict which destroys Djoli, between loyalty to his brother and loyalty to his Law and his wife. There is the battle between good and evil, between the forces of Law and the forces of chaos and destruction, symbolised by the power of arrack, but even more by the power of the mixture of opium and tobacco they call madak, deliberately introduced by Agah Zayd to turn ‘the trading partner into a slave, begging to do the Barbarians’ bidding’ (p 250). Madak destroys the power of the mind, preventing even Nambatj from exercising his psychic powers. Ultimately – if allowed to spread – it would destroy traditional Yolngu society and law.
The novel has four authors – Leonie Norrington, a non-Indigenous woman raised among the Yolngu, and three senior Yolngu elders, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Djawa Burarrwanga and Djawundil Maymuru. As a note states towards the end, the story is based on an ancient historical Yolngu story. As a general rule it may be true, as Phillip Gwynne, a non-Indigenous writer (and author of Deadly, Unna? which was adapted into the 2002 film, Australian Rules) once said, ‘this consultation thing means books by committees’, and most ‘books by committees’ are mediocre at best.
How, exactly, this one works is not explained in detail – whether, for example, the details of each personality, or of the narrative and dialogue, form part of the Yolngu oral history, or how exactly the writing process itself worked between the authors. But work it does. The story is powerful, to the extent that we have, for the first time as far as I am aware, a Yolngu story presented in all its richness – a gift not just for Australian literature, but for Australian politics and cultural and environmental life.
