Garma Festival opened at Gulkula in northeast Arnhem Land at 4pm on Friday and runs to Monday 3 August. The theme this year is Bukmak, a Yolŋu Matha word meaning everyone, or all of us together. The Yothu Yindi Foundation hosts the festival, which is the largest Indigenous gathering in Australia.
Thousands travel to the site for four days of miny'tji, manikay and bunggul, the painting, song and dance traditions of the Yolŋu. Workshops run daily on language, kinship, weaving, spear-making and the yiḏaki. The Garma Cinema is screening films made by First Nations people from Arnhem Land and overseas, including five episodes of Bluey translated into Yolŋu Matha.
Indigenous leaders from East Timor, Papua New Guinea and the Pacific attend this year as guests of honour, on the strength of long-standing Yolŋu connections across the region. Those connections run north across the Arafura Sea rather than south, and the foundation has been widening the guest list along them.
The Key Forum is the policy half of the festival. It draws political, business, academic and philanthropic figures, and this year's program covers land rights, health, education, economic development and government funding. It is the part of the weekend that generates the headlines, and the part that has shaped how federal governments talk about Indigenous policy for most of the past two decades.
Sue-Anne Hunter, the National Commissioner for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children and Young People, spoke about what schools and services get wrong when they treat culture as an add-on. "A child learns best when their culture walks in the door with them," she said. "Cultural safety is not a poster on a wall."
A youth forum runs alongside the main program for children aged 8 to 18, drawn from local communities and from schools that travel in for the weekend. The Bluey translation belongs to the same thread. A child in Arnhem Land watching a cartoon in their first language is doing what every other Australian child does by default, which is the plainest version of the argument the forum spends four days making in policy terms.
Garma is privately hosted. The Yothu Yindi Foundation runs it and its chief executive, Denise Bowden, has built it into the event federal politicians travel to rather than one they convene. The policy conversations happen on Yolŋu country, on a program the foundation sets, and the people whose lives the policy reaches are in the room rather than being consulted about later.
The bunggul runs each evening through to the closing ceremony on Monday.
