Yirrkala

Yirrkala is a small community in East Arnhem Region, Northern Territory, Australia, southeast of the large mining town of Nhulunbuy, on the Gove Peninsula in Arnhem Land. Its population comprises predominantly Aboriginal Australians of the Yolngu people, and it is also home to a number of Mission Aviation Fellowship pilots and engineers based in Arnhem Land, providing air transport services. In the , Yirrkala had a population of 809 people. There has been an Aboriginal community at Yirrkala throughout recorded history, but the community increased enormously in size when Yirrkala mission was founded in 1935, with people from 13 different Yolngu clans moving to Yirrkala. Around this time, the Methodist Overseas Mission (MOM) was encouraging their senior staff to study anthropology under A. P. Elkin at Sydney University, to learn more about Aboriginal Australian culture, in particular the Yolngu people who lived in East Arnhem. Mission superintendents included founding superintendent Wilbur Chaseling, Harold Thornell, and Edgar Wells, who wrote about their experiences there. The residents were free to come and go as they wished and the interaction was on the whole positive in those early days, with a lack of dogmatism by the missionaries, and the Yolngu people accommodating Christianity within a version of their own beliefs. MOM received a government subsidy to run the mission, and school classes operated from 1936, at first outdoors under a tree, and later beneath the Mission House. In 1951 a new school building was built, and by 1952, it had 47 children regularly attending classes there, taught by a Miss Proctor. She was not a trained teacher, but had worked at the mission on Goulburn Island for three years. The mission received child endowment for every Aboriginal child there, regardless of attendance at the school. During World War II, a RAAF airbase operated close by. Many mission residents worked there, as boat pilots for the RAAF and the Royal Australia Navy, or assisted the war effort by other means.