The story starts with a man and a beach. In the 1960s the artist Narritjin Maymuru built his own small gallery on the Yirrkala beachfront, selling Yolngu work directly to outsiders. When the Methodist missionaries departed in the mid-1970s and the land-rights and homeland movements were gathering force, local artists took over the old mission health centre and, in 1976, founded what is now Buku-Larrnggay. A purpose-built museum followed in 1988. Today the centre has two arms: the Yirrkala Art Centre, which represents artists selling contemporary work, and the Mulka Project, which holds the museum and archive. Both run under Yolngu law and governance, an institution the community built for itself rather than one handed down to it.

To understand Buku you have to understand that here, painting is not illustration; it is title. Each clan owns particular sacred designs, the cross-hatched patterns and ancestral figures that record ownership of specific country, and only those entitled to a design may paint it. That is why, when the government excised Yolngu land for a bauxite mine in 1963, elders could answer in paint: the Yirrkala church panels and bark petitions were legal arguments rendered in ochre. The centre still keeps those church panels, two great boards painted by Dhuwa and Yirritja elders, after the church discarded them in 1974 and Buku salvaged them in 1978. Alongside bark, artists here produce larrakitj memorial poles, woven fibre work and yidaki, each form carrying the same encoded knowledge.

The art coordinator Will Stubbs calls one corridor the 'hall of fame', and the walls back him up. Buku represents more than three hundred Yolngu artists from Yirrkala and the surrounding homelands, and their work hangs in galleries around the world and keeps winning the nation's top prizes. Nyapanyapa Yunupingu took the prestigious Wynne Prize in 2021, and her sister Djakangu Yunupingu won it in 2024. Major institutions court the centre constantly: the National Gallery of Victoria mounted 'Bark Ladies: Eleven Artists from Yirrkala', and the Art Gallery of New South Wales has staged a long run of Yirrkala exhibitions, including the landmark 'Yolngu Power: The Art of Yirrkala' in 2025. The income flows back into the homelands, exactly as the founders intended.

Memory is fragile in any culture, and Yolngu elders knew theirs was at risk. In 2007 the centre launched the Mulka Project, a multimedia archive and production unit built to gather thousands of historical photographs and films and to make new digital work. It runs a recording studio, film and music facilities, a teaching centre and a cultural archive, all governed by Yolngu law. The point is not only preservation but employment: the project trains and pays Yolngu people of every age as filmmakers, editors, translators, camera operators, cultural advisors and scholars. A culture that once had its legal existence questioned now records and curates itself, on its own terms, in its own country.

Buku is not a hushed museum. The centre has an outdoor stage named for Roy Marika, the artist and land-rights activist, and it hosts the annual Yarrapay Festival; its 2021 edition, directed by Witiyana Marika, featured Yothu Yindi, Yirrmal, East Journey and the Andrew Gurruwiwi Band. To stand here is to stand at a crossroads of one of the world's oldest continuous cultures and its newest tools, where an elder's ancestral design and a Mulka Project hard drive protect the same inheritance. The white ochre beneath the floor was a coincidence. The depth of what sits above it is not.