Case story

The Community Harmony Project

The Community Harmony Project was an Indigenous collaborative research project with Yolngu, the Aboriginal people of north-east Arnhem Land and other Indigenous researchers. Yolngu researchers Elaine Lawurrpa (Maypilama) and Joanne Garnggulkpuy from the Yalu’ Marnggithinyaraw Nurturing Centre at Galiwin’ku, used ‘first language’ research to look at the issues for Yolngu people sleeping under the stars in Darwin.

Lawurrpa was worried about her brothers who were living as long-grassers in the Darwin suburbs and on the beaches. Something needed to be done. By Yolngu principles, it needed to be properly negotiated. Everyone who had a stake in the issue needed to be involved in the negotiations, especially the long-grassers themselves.

The Yolngu researchers knew a report had already been written about the ‘problem’ (Memmott & Fantin 2001), but the research had been conducted in an academic way. Lawurrpa and Garnggulkpuy needed to do the research in a different way, so that the Yolngu long-grassers could talk about their own experiences in their own languages to their own people (as researchers). 

Lawurrpa  and Garnggulkpuy interviewed Yolngu longgrassers where they lived on the beaches and in the parks of Darwin. For them, doing research the Yolgnu way, finding out what was wrong and doing something about it were the same thing. They happened at the same time and ‘doing’ the findings gave the research a ‘rightness’ from the beginning, as:

• People looked collectively at what was happening – the problems and solutions
• The research process let people (Yolngu and non-Yolngu) know what was happening
• They got support for how Yolngu look after Yolngu, working with government and with the Aboriginal traditional owners of Darwin. Everyone knew that this was a problem to do with Larrakia people, because Darwin is on Larrakia Aboriginal land. If there were ways in which Yolngu were offending Larrakia cultural protocols, then senior Yolngu and senior Larrakia needed to get together to work things out. This understanding was built into the research.

There were some interesting research findings. For example, many Yolngu living in the long grass were there because they felt that they had better opportunities to live Yolngu lives according to Yolngu law in Darwin, than on the ‘mission’. They felt they had escaped from the mission and did not want to go back. Many Yolngu felt that living in the long grass of Darwin was good, like homeland centre life. They felt this was better than sorcery-ridden life on the ‘mission’.

In this project, action was as important as explaining the research in a report. This is different to a lot of academic research, where reporting the findings leads to deciding the ways forward (Christie 2006:82–3; Maypilama et al. 2004). 

See bibliography for full references.