31/08/2026
Special shoutout to Jack Thompson 86 today! Happy birthday mate ✨
“I love the land I live in. I am a patriot; I’m not a nationalist. Until we embrace that history we’re not really living in our present. That is what garma means: coming together in harmony. When the two come together that is Yothu Yindi, and then you have the reality of our here and now.”
Gulpilil used to talk about Jack Thompson a lot. He loved him and they were very dear lifelong friends 💖 The 2 iconic actors of Australian film acted in mad Dog Morgan together back in 1976. Jack especially loved Journey Home, David Gulpilil Jack called it a "A revelatory experience"
This is one of many of Jack's stories, this one is from Guardian Australia The now 85-year-old actor’s "first exposure to Indigenous culture came about when he was just seven, and a young Arunta actor from the central desert country was invited to speak at his school in Narrabeen, New South Wales. “He sang songs in his language and what with his spear and woomera, us as six-, seven-year-old boys were very impressed,” says Thomspon. “We went around learning how to make spears.”
"Thompson’s father, John, then a journalist for ABC radio, started covering north-east Arnhem Land in 1949. Young Thompson was enthralled by the 8mm film interviews with Yolngu people and his meetings with Bill Harney, at the time one of the few “balandas” (a Yolngu word for non-Indigenous person) immersed in Yolngu culture"
“I just wanted to go out there and experience it for myself,” Thompson says. “And I thought what am I doing at school? I don’t have to go to Africa or Asia or Europe. There is this extraordinary thing right there, outside my door.”
"With Harney’s help, Thompson found himself at 14 working as a jackaroo in the Northern Territory, on a cattle station 250 km north-east of Alice Springs. “I was the only white person, the rest were Indigenous people speaking their own language: Alyawarre. In working with my own people – white Australians – never was I treated so well as I was as a 15-year-old with the Alyawarre people. They treated me like a son, like they treated everyone.”
"Later on a friendship with Doctor Yunupingu, the frontman of the music group Yothu Yindi, would bring him to the Garma festival, an annual meeting of Yolngu clans with cultural workshops and political forums open to the general public"
"Thompson is speaking to Guardian Australia from having never missed one. Signing on for Baz Luhrmann’s 2008 film Australia, he even stipulated a break in filming so that he could be flown from one remote part of the country to another to attend"
"From early on, Yunupingu’s concept of two-way learning, which accommodates both Yolngu and western thinking in one education stream, made a significant impression on Thompson. It was a proposal made radical when the Northern Territory government supported imposing English-only education in its schools. Yununpingu approached Thompson to speak out and the actor’s resulting comments about “cultural genocide” created a furore, including threats from a few non-Indigenous Northern Territorians."
"It was around the time of his education comments that Yunupingu invited Thompson to be formally adopted. Elders of the clan accompanied the actor to Gulkula and named him after the bushlands upon which they stood, which is also the name of a Dreamtime hero, Thompson says. From thereon in he became a Yunipingu of the Gumatj clan, of the Yolngu nation. As he tells this part of the story, he reflexively drops the word “yo’s” a few times – the local word for “yes”.
"While Yolngu adoptions of non-Indigenous friends are not uncommon, they are meaningful, placing the adoptee into the complex system of clan and kinship that strictly defines Yolngu relationships and in which they and everything in the world fits. At the time Thompson said to Yunupingu: “It’s a great honour, mate, thank you, but it’s a job too, isn’t it?”
“He just laughed and said yup,” says Thompson.
"Thompson has since found a way to give back to the community with a project that now sits under the Jack Thompson Foundation. [19] years ago he was introduced to John Mofflin, who had the idea of showing Indigenous communities how to build housing from locally available timber, using portable sawmills – these houses could replace the unpleasant, demountable housing assigned by the government, Thompson says.
“I was immediately struck by the intelligence of the scheme and the sense of it. There’s a line in a poem that my father wrote of the Yolngu people, ‘They gathered from living ground their common needs’ ” From his scenic spot at the Garma festival site, Thompson can see an escarpment of the same stringybark eucalypts used in the first round of the project"
"Since then, the project has reincarnated in other parts of the country, each time adapting to the resources of the land. It has even been taken (“We don’t go in there, people invite us,” Thompson says) to central Australia, not far from the cattle station he worked on as a jackaroo and where trees for timber are few and far between. Locals there are encouraged to build with rammed earth and mud brick"
"The project encompassed two modes of thinking: “You go out and there’s a tree,” explains Thompson. “And the answer might be: ‘You can’t take that one because that tree is sacred to my grandmother.’ How about that one?’ And they say: ‘That has a twisty grain and you can’t put it through the mill.’ But we discover a tree that doesn’t have some ritual reason why you can’t cut it and has a straight grain. These are the trees you can cut.”
"Having notched up 18 trips to China, Thompson also counts himself as a sinophile, which explains his nearly 40-year practice of tai chi, complete with Mao-era bu xie slippers. He comfortably mixes together two ancient philosophies when explaining the meaning of yothu yindi: “It’s the equivalent of mother and father, of yin and yang, saltwater and freshwater coming together.”
"For Thompson, the Garma Festival represents a rare opportunity to step into “their world”, an experience that sits in contrast to the usual titbits of cultural artefacts that are inevitably transformed when filtered through the frameworks of mainstream Australian life: “Unless you experience their world it doesn’t really exist; it’s a picture in a book, a bit of singing on the radio, not an understanding that it’s another life, not unlike ours, but another world.”
"Thompson challenges with eloquence the pervading “European” assumption that Indigenous Australians “never did anything, never had anything”.
“It’s a rich life and an extraordinarily sophisticated society,” he says. “Maybe the most sophisticated aspect is that they don’t have all these material things that ultimately we can see bringing us undone – if we’re talking about climate change and having to deal with the devastating destruction created by our material society. How can we regard these people who lived for over 30,000 years without territorial warfare, in balance with their environment, and are our contemporaries, as less civilised than we are? Surely that is balanda denial.”
"Another line from his father’s poetry seems to rise to the surface of Thompson’s mind, each word delivered with a timpani-like boom: “I have what I have had, say I.” In other words: “What you have is all that you have had to this moment, and what you have had includes the history of this land"
“I love the land I live in. I am a patriot; I’m not a nationalist. Until we embrace that history we’re not really living in our present. That is what garma means: coming together in harmony. When the two come together that is yothu yindi, and then you have the reality of our here and now.”
Yolngu Radio
