Yolngu

The Yolngu are Aboriginal Australian clans of north-eastern Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory; their name means person in the Yolngu Matha languages, and every clan belongs to either the Dhuwa or the Yirritja moiety. Their customary law, the Maḏayin, governs land ownership, trade and ceremony through song cycles and sacred sites.

They lived by hunting, fishing and gathering, obtained boomerangs through trade routes reaching Central Australia, and passed messages between distant clans with message sticks carried hundreds of kilometres.

From about the 1500s, Macassan trepang fishermen from Sulawesi anchored off their coasts each monsoon season, exchanging metal tools, cloth and tobacco for pearlshell and labour. The Yolngu word for a European, Balanda, derives from this contact through the Malay term for a Dutchman. Through the early 1800s these voyages remained their main link with the outside world.