One of Australia’s most important Aboriginal leaders, Yunupingu, yesterday died aged 74, with supporters describing the indigenous rights trailblazer as a “giant of the nation.”
Yunupingu played a pivotal role in Aboriginal Australians’ fight for ancestral land rights throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
He was recognized as a “national living treasure” in 1998.
Photo: REUTERS
He is known for the decades he spent advocating for Aboriginal Australians to be recognized in the country’s constitution — an issue that is to be decided through a national referendum at the end of this year.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called Yunupingu — whose family asked that his given name not be used after his death, in keeping with Aboriginal tradition — “one of the greatest Australians.”
“Yunupingu walked in two worlds with authority, power and grace, and he worked to make them whole together,” Albanese said.
“With his passing, consider what we have lost. A leader. A statesman,” he said.
Yunupingu, who died after a long illness, was part of the Yolngu people from Arnhem Land in northern Australia — a remote region spanning tropical coastlines and sprawling inland savannas.
In the early 1960s, he helped draft the Yirrkala bark petitions, in which the Yolngu people sought to stave off foreign mining projects by asserting their ownership of the land.
The petitions, framed by traditional bark paintings, would inspire a generation of Aboriginal land rights activists across the country.
“Yunupingu was a master of the ceremonies and a keeper of the songlines of the Yolngu people,” the Yothu Yindi Foundation said.
“A giant of the nation whose contribution to public life spanned seven decades, he was first and foremost a leader of his people, whose welfare was his most pressing concern and responsibility,” it said.
Indigenous Australians settled in the country about 65,000 years ago.
They have suffered widespread discrimination and oppression since the arrival of the British more than two centuries ago.
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