Words and Things as Repositories of Hope for Peace and Justice on the Ground
Members: William Thengalith Parmbuk, Mathias Nemarluk, Boniface Nemarluk, Mary Ngulkur, Mary Kungiung, Damien Mayerri Tunmuck, Charles Kungiung, Rohan Ngulkur, Harold Nemarluk, Carmen Ngulkur, Lorraine Ngulkur, Dehlia Kungiung, Helen Verran, Leonie Norrington, Yasuo Karaki, Yasunori Hayashi
Location: Wadeye, Darwin, Japan
Funding: NT History Grant, CDU Innovative Research Grant
Duration: 2025 – ongoing
Project description: This project aims to make a start on developing thick layers of history around recently discovered heritage items, marluk (didgeridoo) and kuragadha (boomerang) made by Charlie Newili Brinken (1910-1993) of Rak Tjindi Malimandi, Marri Amu. In 2025 these items fell unexpectedly into the metaphorical arms of CDU First Nations Sovereignty and Diplomacy Centre. As we interpret things, these items are profoundly entangled with the fate of three Japanese seamen Nagata, Yoshida, and Owashi whose memorial stands in the Gardens Road Cemetery.
This project collaborates with the descendants of Newili and Nemarluk in Wadeye. It aims to
- unearth the hidden presence of an Indigenous archive concerning the events at Wadeye in the early 1930s,
- bring to light details of an ‘other’ set of individual and institutional responses to the events in that place and time of their happening, and
- create a ‘parallel provenance’ stream in the the National Archive around the story of Nemarluk and his people.
Despite the large settler archive of Nemarluk, which remembers him as a warrior and resistance leader in novels and online records, as well as naming of a local school and a drive in the northern suburbs of Darwin after him, little has seemingly been recorded by the descendants of Nemarluk. Unearthing an Indigenous archive could provide a thick layering in chronological and auto-ethnographic accounts, intertwined with the continued existence of these two collected items (the didgeridoo and the boomerang).
The repatriation provides the opportunity for the two ethnographic objects to be put on public display along with a collection of photographs, art work and texts, for their stories to be told and recorded, and celebrated through an exhibition and public floor talk. They will provide a catalyst for the Murrinh people’s oral histories, the historical records, and the stories of the Japanese presence in pre-WWII northern Australia to be brought to network together.
Project milestones:
April 2026
Repatriation ceremony at Library and Archive NT
Public philosophy seminar at Library and Archive NT
