Lit by a campfire’s glow and framed by the ancient red Bynguano Range, the beat of clap sticks and hum of a didgeridoo echo through Ngalkirrika, a natural amphitheatre in Mutawintji National Park in the New South Wales outback.
Hundreds of spectators with freshly cooked johnnycakes in hand sit on the hills surrounding a dance circle, watching as performance groups from across the country gather for the biggest First Nations festival in western NSW. These performers aren’t just here to dance at this now-annual event, but to connect – to Country, to culture, and to each other.
Since its inception in 2022, the Mutawintji Cultural Festival has grown in a short space of time into a powerful celebration of Aboriginal culture. This year, it reached new heights, drawing a record crowd of more than 700 people to celebrate. Not bad, considering how remote it is. Mutawintji NP is more than 880km north-west of Sydney and ultimately only accessible by dusty, unsealed outback roads.
Mutawintji means ‘place of green grass and water’ in the Wiimpatja Parlku dialect. For millennia, this site has been a sacred meeting place for Indigenous communities, and this festival is ensuring that role continues today.
Mutawintji NP spans almost 700sq.km and sits in the Far West of NSW, about an hour-and-a-half’s drive north-east of the iconic outback town of Broken Hill. It’s of immense cultural significance, being home to about 300 recorded Aboriginal sites, many of which showcase rock art, notably engravings and stencils.
Mutawintji also holds rich fossil deposits dating from the Cambrian and Devonian, although some rocks inside the park are even older, having formed some 650 million years ago (mya).
This now-arid landscape – once located at the eastern edge of the supercontinent Gondwana – has changed dramatically over time.
In the Cambrian (approximately 500mya), tectonic activity created a chain of volcanoes whose eruptions and magma intrusions led to the formation of new rock layers. These rocks were uplifted during mountain-building events, which were followed by long periods of weathering and erosion.
By the Devonian (approximately 400mya) the area lay submerged underwater, and today the eroded remnants of this ancient seabed form much of the Mutawintji landscape.
During the 1980s, the destruction and removal of rock art here drew attention to the inappropriate management of the park and the lack of recognition of the Traditional Owners, triggering a blockade that would change the history of land rights in NSW.
Mutawintji blockade
In September 1983, in searing heat, beneath the red cliffs and ancient rock art of Mutawintji, a line was drawn in the dirt. The Traditional Owners had decided they’d had enough; vandalism and neglect of this sacred area had highlighted a need for reform at Mutawintji.
Aboriginal custodians and allies rose up, and they blocked the road into the park, turning tourists away. It was no symbolic gesture, but rather a stand to protect ancestors, cultural stories, and the heartbeat of Country itself. The blockade was bold, defiant and unprecedented in NSW, forcing the state government to listen and the nation to look.
Brian Doolan was on the blockade. Back then he was an adult-education teacher working in the nearby town of Wilcannia, and later became a CEO of the Fred Hollows Foundation, the Australian-based world-leading charity working to end preventable blindness.
“We came here a couple of times and the idea for the blockade sort of arose,” he recalls. “Mutawintji was getting protection from [NSW] National Parks [and Wildlife Service] but there was no recognition of Aboriginal ownership. The recognition that it must have been very important was almost in past tense. There wasn’t a sense that it was still very important and had an ongoing and contemporary role.”
Brian says that this period – from the late 1970s onwards – had seen a growth in political awareness and resulting protests, and that this blockade was a part of that movement.
“In the late ’70s we were coming out of the Vietnam protests. Apartheid was still very big. It was an era of protest and also pre the [Aboriginal] Land Rights Act in NSW,” he says. “So that was really what the blockade was about – coming here not to achieve anything other than awareness that people still thought this was a very important site. It still had great significance in people’s lives.”
About 200 people gathered at the site to participate in the peaceful protest. “It was a very significant time for local people to have a voice and to say, ‘No, this is really important. It’s important to us,’” Brian says. “They weren’t being disrespectful. They were standing at the gates, and they were saying to people, ‘Look, we really don’t want you to come in here. We’re trying to make a point.’”
The blockade was a strong sign of the Traditional Owners’ desire to regain ownership, control and management of the park, and it triggered a series of negotiations between the Mutawintji Aboriginal Land Council and the NSW Government that persisted for more than a decade before the National Parks and Wildlife Amendment (Aboriginal Ownership) Act was passed in 1996, enabling a lease agreement to go ahead for the site.
On 5 September 1998, management of the park was formally handed back to the Traditional Owners in what was the very first agreement of its kind in the state. The agreement supported the rights of local Indigenous people to hunt, fish and gather food in the park, and a board of management was elected to oversee operations.
At this year’s cultural festival, 42 years after that landmark blockade, Brian is met with a very different Mutawintji. “This is the first time I’ve been back since that weekend,” he says. “Most of the people I knew well and would call friends are no longer with us. But I hear people talking to one another, and I hear their names, and I think, ‘I knew their grandfather.’”
Brian says he feels fortunate to have had the experience he did at the blockade. “We were very lucky,” he says. “A friend of mine who was here back then says to me often, ‘You know what? We were slapped on the arse by an angel.’ We were so lucky to have met those people at that time, to be taken into these friendship groups. It was a very unique experience for dumb young whitefellas like us.”
Cultural pride
It’s Saturday morning – the second and final day of this year’s festival – and a haze of red surrounds the Mutawintji Visitor Centre. A dance circle has formed in the dirt, and dancers kick up dust with their bare feet while mimicking the movements of emus.
Thikkabilla Vibrations dance teacher Tyrone Gordon demonstrates dance moves as friends rhythmically beat together clap sticks around the edge of the circle. Dance has played a pivotal role in Tyrone’s life.
“Culture saved my life,” he says. “Unfortunately, I was a bad kid growing up, and so my mum and dad sent me to the droving camps. At the camps we used to travel around mustering cattle during the day, and then at night the old people taught me all the dances and songs and stories.”
Tyrone, who has travelled from Dubbo for the festival, has been every year since it began. “I’m loyal to it,” he says. “The smoke, the fire, the people laughing, the kangaroo – it’s the same old yarn every time.”
Barkandji man Kevin Dean Whyman is emceeing this year’s event. He says he’s proud to have Mutawintji host these cultural ceremonies. “This is a meeting place. It has a very strong cultural history of coming together,” he says. “Having all the groups from all over the place, we all connect.”
Luke Driscoll, a Wiradjuri man who is the CEO of the Barkandji Native Title Aboriginal Corporation that oversees this part of Far West NSW, agrees with Kevin’s sentiment.
“The ability to both connect with the land and the stories that are already here – and this being the traditional meeting place of the Barkandji people – that’s what makes this so important,” he says.
“Having all of these different dance groups come in and share their stories and traditions – we’re coming together not to address any social or political injustices or anything to do with that. We’re coming together for something good.”
The festival director, Barkandji/Malyangapa man Leroy Johnson, says he was inspired to create the festival after realising he only saw his mob when there was sadness – a sickness, a funeral. “We were only ever seeing each other for sorry business, and we wanted to have a festival for good, where we can celebrate and share culture,” he says.
Culture isn’t shared only at the nightly corroboree. Skills such as weaving and clap-stick making are taught back at the visitor centre, and volunteers and rangers cook locally hunted kangaroo and emu for communal dinners.
Reconnecting people
Today, almost three decades after the historic handback, Mutawintji is protected and celebrated. Jaymie Norris, area manager for NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service in the West Darling, has worked alongside Traditional Owners for nearly a decade. “I came out here [to western NSW] as a kid,” he says.
“But I never really understood the depth of connection to Country until I came [to Mutawintji]. Bringing kids back and reconnecting with people, reconnecting with culture on Country – that’s a completely different thing. It generates a lot of respect. They’re welcoming this knowledge sharing that has happened for millennia.”
On Sunday morning, as the last embers of the campfires die out, people begin their journeys back to all corners of the country. They carry with them the pride of this place and its hard-fought-for history. Mutawintji is no longer a place of the past, but a 21st-century meeting ground – a political landmark and a living archive of Aboriginal resistance.
This place of green grass and water will continue to create stories that will be documented and retold around the fire for future generations. And, if all goes to plan, they might just be retold around a campfire at the Mutawintji Cultural Festival.
