In the 1600s, a Yolŋu girl was kidnapped from an Australian beach. Centuries later her story is a novel

The Guardian

10-02-2025

When she was still a girl, one of Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs's grandmothers was kidnapped from the coast of Arnhem Land by foreign traders.
'My grandmother's sister used to tell me that they went down and saw the footprints of her little sister in the mud, and [the prints of] shoes,' the Yolŋu elder recalls. 'And they figured out that the prau [sailing boat] had taken her – because the prau was there, and then suddenly it wasn't.'
Ganambarr-Stubbs says there are lots of stories like this throughout north-east Arnhem Land, stretching back across hundreds of years of trade between Yolŋu and traders from the port of Macassar – in present-day eastern Indonesia – who arrived annually during the wet season to harvest trepang (sea cucumbers).
One such story is the basis for the new historical novel A Piece of Red Cloth. Co-authored by Ganambarr-Stubbs with fellow Yolŋu knowledge holders Djawa Burarrwanga and Djawundil Maymuru and novelist Leonie Norrington, it represents a pioneering collaboration between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal storytellers: pre-colonial Yolŋu oral history, told as western-style literature.
Set in coastal Arnhem Land in the late 1600s, A Piece of Red Cloth revolves around a Yolŋu elder trying to protect her granddaughter from foreign traders. The story takes place at a crucial turning point in history: Makassar is under the control of Dutch merchants, and the novel shows how a ruthless new cohort of traders adopted the tools of the colonisers, plying Yolŋu men with alcohol and opium in order to secure access to young women and children – a valuable commodity in the sex-trafficking trade. In the face of this new threat, the elder Yolŋu women eventually take matters into their own hands.
'It's a true history,' says Ganambarr-Stubbs. In the novel's foreword, she details the centuries-deep trading relationship between the Yolŋu and Macassans that precedes the events of the novel, writing: 'They learnt from us, and we learnt from them. Most of the time our interactions were peaceful. There were no wars. They didn't want us to change our religion … We respected them and they respected us.'
In the story, as in real life, the kidnapped girl's family retaliates and refuses the Macassans access to their Country thereafter.
This history is well known to Yolŋu people, 'sung and told orally from generations to generations,' says Ganambarr-Stubbs, who also teaches it as part of a special bilingual and 'both ways' curriculum at Yirrkala school.
Elsewhere in Australia, however, this chapter of pre-colonial history is less known, thanks to western academia's reliance on written sources.
Ganambarr-Stubbs hopes the novel will educate a broader audience: 'Wider Australia should learn more about the history – all the histories – because that's how all of us came to be here now.'
The novel also offers readers a rare portrait of pre-colonial Yolŋu life: its pleasures, politics and relationships, sustained by a rich culture and cosmology. We experience hunts, harvests and bushcraft; councils, ceremonies and rituals.
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Ganambarr-Stubbs is keen to point out that this is how Yolŋu are 'still living now, in the modern world'. (While we're talking over the phone, I hear her grandchildren asking her if she's getting ready to go hunting.) This desire to share culture was the genesis of A Piece of Red Cloth, although it was another Yolŋu woman who spearheaded the project: the late Clare Bush. Bush and her husband adopted Norrington's entire family when they moved to Bamyili/Barunga in the 1960s, formally taking responsibility for their cultural education. Norrington maintained a lifelong relationship with her adoptive mum, who worked with her on an outline for the book before her death about 20 years ago.
'What she wanted most was to represent the Yolŋu as strong, powerful people who were in charge of the weather and the land, and [show that] they could control foreigners,' says Norrington.
After Bush died, her sisters, artists Mulkan and Muluymuluy Wirrpanda (the latter's art graces the book's cover), introduced Norrington to her three co-authors, holders of the Macassan time stories in their respective communities in Yirrkala and Bawaka homeland. Together, they supervised the writing and editing of the book and told Norrington what stories and details should be included. Or shouldn't be, including sacred or secret Yolŋu knowledge, words, names or locations. 'Any knowledge that's presented is open knowledge,' says Norrington.
'For the Yolŋu people, the land, the people, the song, the story – everything emerged at the same time. So people don't create stories, they just tell them. And if they come from the right country, then they are able to tell them,' Norrington says. 'It's a completely different way of understanding authorship.'
'I had to make sure that it was the most Yolŋu as Yolŋu it can be,' Ganambarr-Stubbs says, 'and make sure that people in Australia would understand or feel the actual feeling of Yolŋu ways and laws, and food and hunting, and how to behave to others.'
Prof Jeanine Leane, a Wiradjuri writer and academic with expertise in Aboriginal representation within Australian literature, says A Piece of Red Cloth sets 'a benchmark in what real collaboration [between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal storytellers] can be'.
'It's not an opportunistic literary exercise,' she says, noting that Norrington's 'long term, deep relationship to place and people' – through growing up with Bush and her family – sets her apart from authors who engage 'extractively' with Aboriginal culture.
In her author's note, Norrington writes that her adoptive mum 'was a skilful and prolific storyteller' who believed 'that if people could get to know each other through personal experience, and/or its close affiliate, narrative, they would come to understand and respect each other.'
This drives Norrington's work too. Reflecting on the power of narrative, she points to the personal stories contained within the 1997 report on the stolen generations, Bringing Them Home: 'Had everybody read those stories, it would have changed the way we understood that whole business of taking the children away. But instead, people started arguing academically or historically about it, which meant that it became a 'them and us'. We lost this huge opportunity for healing,' she says.
'And I think it's the same with [the Yolŋu stories]: if we listen, we can maybe change our minds a little bit, have a bit more respect. Aboriginal people, since the first invaders came, have been trying to say, 'Look, we have a really wonderful way of understanding the world, and you can learn from it.' Nobody's really listened yet.'
A Piece of Red Cloth is out now through Allen and Unwin ($34.99)