In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Professor Clare Wright OAM chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Näku Dhäruk The Bark Petitions: How the People of Yirrkala Changed the Course of Australian Democracy.

Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:

• Clare Wright’s deep 15-year cultural integration with the Yolŋu community in North-East Arnhem Land enabled her to write The Bark Petitions collaboratively and authentically from a First Nation’s perspective.
• The four Bark Petitions were created by Yolŋu Elders in 1963 as a form of diplomacy between two sovereign nations. The Yolŋu Elders were protesting bauxite mining on sacred lands without their consent.
• The Bark Petitions reframes the petitions as a manifestation of Yolŋu law and territorial rights, revealing a sophisticated legal system governing land, kinship and governance that predates and rivals European colonial systems.
• Wright positions The Bark Petitions as Australian political history with Indigenous perspectives restored.
• The Bark Petitions transcends a classic object biography. Instead, it’s a hybrid of cultural storytelling, sacred stories, oral history, narrative history, political activism and a powerful account of sovereignty and resistance.
• The Bark Petitions employs a kaleidoscopic, non-linear narrative structure.
• Wright deliberately gives the final voice to a contemporary Yolŋu woman, emphasising that Indigenous people are living storytellers shaping ongoing national conversations and positioning the Bark Petitions as an eternal flame of resistance and knowledge.