What price spiritual connection? Yolngu seek compensation for cultural destruction

Challenge seeks recompense for loss of culture and income from 50 years of bauxite mining in Arnhem Land and could give rise to many similar claims

Australia’s Indigenous traditional owners will closely observe what promises to be the glacial progress of a quest by a north-east Arnhem Land clan for commonwealth compensation for the loss of culture and income from half a century of bauxite mining.

The Gumatj clan of the Yolngu people have received statutory mining royalties since 1978 and are now recipients, via a future fund, of $700m in incremental payments stretching out to 2053. But the Gumatj elder Galarrwuy Yunupingu is now also seeking commonwealth compensation for the cultural impact of mining on his land and people by Nabalco and Rio Tinto.

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Country is memory laid down by the lives of one’s family, by the events of one’s childhood, by the journeys of one’s ancestors and by the conflicts of a changing world

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