Clare Wright’s brilliant book, Naku Dharuk: The Bark Petitions, is a compelling and essential account of great scope and depth. It makes an enormous contribution not only to the history of Australian democracy but to our future direction… In the words of the book’s subtitle, it tells the inspiring story of how the people of Yirrkala changed the course of Australian democracy. In this story the Indigenous people themselves are joined by missionaries, miners, government agents and politicians. Wright explores all their perspectives and contributions with vigour, forensic research and great sensitivity. In doing so she gave meticulous regard to the cross-cultural issues involved. Her outstanding research involved both traditional academic archival methods and deep learning from Indigenous people by living in the region for months at a time.

An interview with Clare Wright

Interviewing Clare Wright, author of ‘Naku Dharuk: The Bark Petitions’ for the 2025 Australian Political Book of the Year Award

Naku Dharuk has received a lot of recognition. What was your reaction to it being nominated for the Australian Political Book of the Year Shortlist?

I was absolutely thrilled when Naku Dharuk was shortlisted for the Australian Political Book of the Year Award. It’s been shortlisted for several awards this year and won both the NT History Award and the Queensland Literary Awards, which I was delighted about. But this particular shortlist was especially sweet for me because the book is being recognised as political history—and that’s exactly what it is.

We often think of politics as something happening in the moment, tied to the 24/7 news cycle, and we put history in a separate box. But today’s long-form political journalism is tomorrow’s history. What journalists are writing about now, historians will be writing about in 50, 100, or 150 years. So to have my work as a historian recognised alongside these brilliant journalists is incredibly validating. It affirms the purpose of the work: using evidence-based history to engage with contemporary political debates. Many of the themes in the book remain unresolved and are still being fought for as a nation.

You note in the book that many Australians aren’t familiar with the history of the Indigenous civil rights movement. For someone new to it, how would you describe your book? What will they learn?

The first thing I want to say is that people who aren’t familiar with reading history or politics are really flocking to the book because it’s a page-turner. Readers tell me it feels more like a mystery or a whodunit, they want to know what happens next. It’s novelistic and even filmic, like a Netflix series you binge because you’re invested in the characters and the story.

That’s partly due to the way I’ve written it, which isn’t typical for historical writing, but it’s also the nature of the story itself. It’s a big story, and I’ve pieced it together with forensic detail to show how the protagonists – whether miners, government officials, the Yolngu people, or church missionaries all have a stake in this unfolding drama in a tiny place in northeast Arnhem Land, in Yirrkala.

There are allies and antagonists, people trying to achieve something and others trying to stop them. That’s the essence of drama. So I’d describe the book as an episode in Australia’s political and democratic history.

This story joins the other two books in my Democracy Trilogy: The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka and You Daughters of Freedom. All three are connected by a narrative about the democratic impulse – government by the people, for the people – but who are the people? The franchise keeps widening, and we see that through these protest movements. Each book is tied to a physical artifact: the Eureka flag, the women’s suffrage banner, and the Naku Dharuk bark petitions.

You would have thought about my next question a lot, I imagine, and we could probably talk about it for hours, but why is it do you think that it's it is a forgotten part of Australia's history? Why don't more people know more about it?

Well, you know, people used to ask me why we don’t know about women’s roles in the Eureka Stockade, which I documented in Forgotten Rebels of Eureka. And I said, well, there’s a one-word answer to that: patriarchy.

And I could give you a two-word answer to your question: white supremacy. Or, to put a gentler inflection on it, colonialism.

The fact is, history has traditionally been seen as the achievements, accomplishments, and development of a nation largely built by white men. That’s why we get a monolithic version of Australia’s national story – told from the perspective of those white men, who were, for so long, also the historians.

Of course, this has been changing over the last 50 years or so, since the 1970s. We’ve seen a flourishing of history from the ground up, especially Indigenous and First Nations history, increasingly told by First Nations scholars.

But this story, I think, has flown under the radar a bit. It’s often been subsumed by its more well-known cousin: the Mabo decision.

The story of the Naku Daruk, the Yirrkala bark petitions, is really the first step in the journey that leads to Mabo.

You’ll find a brief mention of the petitions at the beginning of most books about land rights in Australia, native title, or the Mabo decision. You’ll see it in books about Indigenous civil rights in general, but only in a short version.

So, in a sense, insiders have known the story, but it hasn’t taken on that grand national narrative in the way Mabo has. That’s partly because it’s been confined to a small geographical corner of the nation, and also because it’s largely been buried in archives and in the oral history of the Yolnu people.

I had the particular privilege of accessing both the colonial archive and the Yolnu oral history archive, thanks to my connection to the community up there.

What was the reaction of the local people – the Yolngu people – when you said, “I’m writing this book”?

This book was very much inspired by the Yolngu people's desire to have the story told. I had been a culturally adopted member of the community for many years before Narraku dhuway Galarrwuy Yunupingu whose name I have permission from the family to use – discussed the book with me.

He was the husband of the woman who had adopted me, so I was very much part of the Yunupingu family and living in that household.

Many years later, when he found out I was a historian, he said, “Oh, you tell stories. I tell stories too.” And the story he wanted us to tell together was this one from the Yolngu point of view.
It was often described as an open wound or an unclosed book. Many people believed there was another petition that hadn’t yet been found. The old people had told stories of more than the two petitions one in Parliament House and one at the National Museum. They called the missing one “our lost treasure.” 

So I was very much invited to tell this story by the community. It’s been a collaborative work, involving many repeat visits, sitting down with an increasing number of elders who wanted to share parts of the story.

I kept returning with things I had found in the archives, things they didn’t know, and together we pieced the story together, including locating the fourth petition.

Through archival research and collaboration with community members, we were able to repatriate it back to Yirrkala. It now hangs in the art centre there, the Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre, for the community to feel proud of and to share with their children and grandchildren. That was incredibly important to the elders and community leaders.

That’s a nice segue to my next question. Our Award judges noted that your book exposes an extraordinary chapter in our democratic history, and that it involved painstaking research. Your work has been called a monumental achievement and a masterpiece. What piece of feedback have you most treasured?

Well, I do like being called a masterpiece and a monumental achievement – and not just because the book is over 600 pages long and took me 10 years to research and write!

But the greatest feedback came from two places.

One was at the national launch of the book in Yirrkala in October last year. It was launched by community elders, particularly by Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr -Stubbs, my yapa and also by about six young people who wanted to speak.

That’s how Yolngu gatherings tend to go, everyone wants to speak. They all said how important it was that this book had been written, because it gave Australia the opportunity to hear and know this story. They felt that this dawu, the word for story was now being shared across Australia. That was incredibly gratifying for them, and tear-jerkingly gratifying for me.

The second bit of feedback has come from the Australian public. The book has received great accolades from people I admire: Megan Davis, Thomas Mayo, Tom Griffiths, Frank Bongiorno, and William Dalrymple.

But the fact that the book has gone into its fourth printing in less than a year – that’s music to my ears. It means Australians are reading it. It means the Yolngu people's aspiration to have their story known is actually happening.

The purpose of the Australian Political Book of the Year Award is to recognise long-form analytical writing especially in a time when attention spans seem to be shrinking. Why do you think it’s important to recognise long-form writing?

I think long form writing is so important because it rests very heavily on an evidence base. It's really hard to sustain an argument that is longer than a tweet or a TikTok or a headline grabbing opinion piece in a digital forum.

Long form journalism can only happen when it does have that really strong core foundation of an evidence base, and whether that is the historical archive like I've used for this book or whether it's journalists like the other shortlisted.

Whether you agree with it or not, whether you want to hear it or not, you have to take it into account. You can’t dismiss it. I mean, President Trump doesn’t think climate change is real. People will always dismiss certain aspects of political discourse.

But everything political is about power and exposing power through an evidence base is always going to be the truest way to do that.