Book Launch - Naku Dharuk The Bark Petitions: How the People of Yirrkala Changed the Course of Australian Democracy

Join us for wine, snacks, and great chat at the launch of Clare Wright OAM's latest book, Naku Dharuk The Bark Petitions: How the People of Yirrkala Changed the Course of Australian Democracy. The book will be launched on the night by The Honourable Mr Kim Beazley along with an in-conversation with Prof Jane Lydon with the two discussing Clare's book that has already been described as 'A masterpiece' (Thomas Mayo). 

About the Book

In 1963—a year of agitation for civil rights worldwide—the Yolŋu of northeast Arnhem Land created the Yirrkala Bark Petitions: Näku Dhäruk. ‘The land grew a tongue’ and the land-rights movement was born.

Näku Dhäruk is the story of a founding document in Australian democracy and the trailblazers who made it. It is also a pulsating picture of the ancient and enduring culture of Australia’s first peoples. 

And it is a masterful, groundbreaking history.


About the Presenters

Professor Clare Wright OAM is an award-winning historian, author, broadcaster and public commentator who has worked in politics, academia and the media. Clare is currently Professor of History and Professor of Public Engagement at La Trobe University. In 2020, Clare was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia in the Australia Day Honours list for “services to literature and to historical research”. She is the author of four works of history, including the best-selling The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka and You Daughters of Freedom, which comprise the first two instalments of her Democracy Trilogy. Clare hosts the ABC Radio National history series, Shooting the Past, and co-hosts the LTU podcast Archive Fever. She is popular public speaker, panellist and interviewer and makes frequent appearances at literary festivals, in television documentaries, on radio talk shows and generally anywhere someone will pass her a microphone.

Jane Lydon is Professor of History and Wesfarmers Chair of Australian History at the University of Western Australia. Her research centres upon Australia's colonial past and its legacies in the present. She worked as an archaeologist before becoming a historian, and retains an interest in diverse forms of evidence for the past, especially photographic archives.