Aboriginal leader Yunupingu, recognized by Australia as a “living treasure” and a pioneer in defending the rights of his people, died on Monday at the age of 74, the government announced.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese mourned the loss of “one of Australia’s greatest” and “a statesman”.
Yunupingu played a vital role in the Aboriginal people’s struggle for recognition of the right to ancestral lands in the 1960s and 1970s.
For decades he campaigned for the recognition of the aborigines, people who were in Australia before European settlers arrived, in the constitution, an issue that will be put to a referendum at the end of this year.
Hailing from Arnhem Land in the far north of the country, Yunupingu rose to prominence in the early 1960s when, along with the Yolngu people, he submitted petitions to parliament made from tree bark to protest against a mining project on the land.
Arnhem Land is a region of nearly 97,000 square kilometers and a population of over 16,000, located in the northeastern corner of the Northern Territory’s Top End, approximately 500 kilometers from the territory’s capital, Darwin.
The leader, who died of illness, was also a “master of ceremonies and a guardian of the chant lines” by which the Yolngu people preserve oral memory, according to the Yothu Yindi Foundation. In 1998 it was recognized by the Australian government as a “living treasure”.
“Yunupingu moved into two worlds with authority, strength and grace and worked to make them one together,” Albanese said.
Aboriginal people have inhabited Australia for some 65,000 years by various estimates, but they have been subject to various forms of discrimination, oppression and dispossession since British colonization began in the 18th century.
Source: DN
