Treaty

In 1988, the year of Australia's Bicentennial, Prime Minister Bob Hawke went to the Barunga Festival in the Northern Territory, where Galarrwuy Yunupingu and Wenten Rubuntja handed him a statement of Aboriginal political goals. Hawke promised a treaty with Indigenous Australians by 1990. It did not come. Galarrwuy's younger brother Mandawuy, singer of Yothu Yindi, wanted a song about that broken promise. By his account it was born around a campfire while he searched for a chord on the guitar: he had heard about the treaty on the radio and seen it on television, and that, he thought, should be the catchphrase. Written with Paul Kelly and Peter Garrett among others, "Treaty" came out in February 1991 and went nowhere. Then Melbourne DJ Gavin Campbell asked Mushroom Records for a dance remix. His Filthy Lucre team rebuilt it without the band's involvement, on the understanding that the Yolngu side would be kept, and they dropped most of the English, leaving the song sung almost entirely in Gumatj. That version reached the national top 20, the first song by a predominantly Aboriginal band to chart in Australia, and became the first song partly in an Aboriginal language to win wide international attention. Mandawuy took leave from his job as principal of Yirrkala Community School to tour it. The treaty it asked for still has not been signed. After the Indigenous Voice referendum failed in October 2023, Triple J played "Treaty" on repeat for a full hour in protest.