WITITJ HEALING

When the balanda - white man - landed on Arnhem Land shores in the 1800s, Yolngu did not at first recognise these whitefellas as real, live people. To the Yolngu, the balanda were not men but paperbark ghosts.

It is not my first time in Arnhem Land, but it is the first time I have been shown its truest, secret face. From the air it is a vast, scrubby, seemingly empty land that stretches from the rocky escarpments of Kakadu in the west, over technicolour wetlands and winding brown rivers, to Groote Eylandt in the east, a lush land of manganese riches and crystal blue seas.

I have visited the Gulf of Carpentaria's shore twice this year. In Yirrkala, the birthplace of Aboriginal land rights, I saw Arnhem Land in all of its ceremonial glory as its most famous leader, Galarrwuy Yunupingu, presided over an intricate ceremony performed in front of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. On that June day, as soft rain fell, Rudd accepted a bark petition from the Yolngu leaders calling for constitutional recognition of the rights of Aboriginal people in East Arnhem land.

"These rights are self-evident," the petition says. "These rights are fundamental to our place in the Australian nation."

Now, I trundle in a troop carrier up the Central Arnhem Road - a potholed gravel highway that stretches 700km from Katherine to Nhulunbuy. It will be my last opportunity before the rivers rise and leave the Yolngu stranded by road.

Barely a soul braves this long winding highway in the wet season. But it is still early December and, as we meander our way to the tiny community of Mapuru near Elcho Island, where Guyula's family run a business weaving dyed pandanus into colourful baskets, we warily watch the sky.

The possibility of being stranded at Mapuru looms large but we push on, much as the Yolngu do as they wade into crocodile-infested rivers with a calculated faith.

As we rattle along the road, we dodge Brahmin carcasses that lie rotting on the red dirt, their flesh long ago scavenged, flaccid grey hides drooped over piles of bones. They are fetid reminders of the underworld mystery of Arnhem Land, a land of recycled souls where certain death can come with a song.

The Yolngu speak of ghosts in conspiratorial whispers. To Guyula, nothing dies: every frill-necked lizard or black cockatoo that haunts this great chunk of unwanted country, declared an Aboriginal reserve in 1931, is a reincarnation.

"When I'm talking, actually standing on my land with my feet on the ground, I get this feeling that I am welcomed by nature," Yingiya tells me over the din of his Pajero shuddering over corrugations.

"The tears of joy start to run from my eyes, and the fur on the back of my neck shoots up. It is telling me that I am actually surrounded by my own image: the spirits of my fathers. The ground itself actually is the spirits of my fathers."

Guyula, 50, was born at Mirrngatja, a homeland surrounding the Arafura swamp in central Arnhem Land. His education was survival, learned from uncles and grandfathers in the harsh but bountiful bush. Conservation and respect for country were its central themes.

As he stops by the side of the road and picks munydjutj (bush plum), he squeezes the olive-size fruits, picking only the soft, ripe ones. Do not waste the bush tucker, he tells me, or thunder and lightning will light up an angry sky.

Guyula began school at 11 at the Elcho Island mission. There he encountered a learning culture diametrically opposed to his own. "In balanda school you ask lots of questions, but in Yolngu school you don't ask questions. It's bad manners because you are trying to steal something from the knowledge of the senior elder. He alone can give you information. But you don't force it. Wait until he can see that you are ready. He knows when to tell this story."

Guyula went on to become a pilot.

Hours pass; we gobble Cherry Ripes and pass Barunga, Beswick, Bulman and the turn-off to Ramingining. We stop and pick bush apples, narrani, lolly-red fruits with large seeds that tingle my tastebuds with their lemony tang.

Guyula, a lecturer in Yolngu matha (languages) at Charles Darwin University in Darwin, teaches me to twist my mouth around the difficult shapes of his mother tongue. I manage the easy ones. Yo. (Right on, yes, I agree). Manymak. (Good.) Yaka main ma. (Bad.) Later, the children in Mapuru call me yapa - sister - and they won't let me forget my new word. I hear it everywhere I turn: "Yapa! Lolly?" (They know I have a tin of butterscotch and cannot say no). "Yapa! Me have four lollies, no, five!" "Yapa, where you from? Have boyfriend?"

Through the subtleties of his mother tongue, Guyula opens Western minds to the sophisticated, holistic Aboriginal worldview.

"Most of the things around here, all of the land, all of the rivers, they are all associated," Guyula says.

"It is yothu yindi, mother and child. That is life. Every bit of land is related to another bit of land, it calls it mother, or calls it child. And a person also calls a bit of land mother or child," he says.

Yet this is the land that for almost 200 years the crown called terra nullius, the land of no one. Guyula remembers the insult with pain and frustration, his memories curiously crystallising around the snowy-haired stalwart of Queensland monoculturalism, former premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

"I heard him say once 'how can there be a spirit in the goanna?'," Guyula says. "How can I tell these stories to people like Joh Bjelke-Petersen, that there is a spirit in the goanna?

"Surely there must be a way to explain why the tears of joy run down my cheeks or why the hair on the back of my neck stands up when I stand and sing on my land. How can I explain that to a balanda?"

As the rainclouds darken, we stop the car at a plateau embedded by shards of stone like broken pieces of white slate littering the ground. Spotting a mound of sticks surrounded by white bones, I am led silently across the plateau. "Have you ever seen a bower?"

I have heard of the bower bird, but I have never seen the elaborate structure erected by the male bird to attract a mate. Hundreds of sticks are piled vertically on the ground. They form two arcs that face one another. At either end, carefully placed bones decorate the bower. In the middle are shimmering green jewels, small pieces of glass, collected from some broken, abandoned bottle, the green colour an irresistible aphrodisiac.

Around us on the plateau, salmon gums radiate the pink light of dusk, soft against the charcoal sky. I climb into the crook of a branch and stretch my legs along its smooth trunk. Termite mounds rise from the dirt like white tombstones. A Gouldian finch, a rare sight these days, flits into a nearby tree.

In the silence I wonder whether Guyula and I will live to see our country emerge from its long, tumultuous adolescence.

Will the childish, high hopes born at Barunga, on this road, in 1988, when Bob Hawke promised a treaty, be left forever among Arnhem Land's termite gravestones. Will our country ever reach adulthood?