Fibre work is one of the great traditions of Yolngu women, and Gapuwiyak is among its strongest centres. The core material is gunga, the pandanus, whose long spiny leaves are stripped, dyed with roots and bark in soft ochres, reds and yellows, then twined and coiled into bathi - baskets and containers - and into gay'wu, the string bags spun from the inner bark of certain trees. The same hands that make a humble carrying basket also make striking sculptural figures: crocodiles, birds, and the cloth-and-fibre 'dolly' dolls that have become a signature of the place, blending the very old craft with playful new forms. The local art centre, Gapuwiyak Culture and Arts, supports these makers, and master weavers such as Lucy Wanapuyngu have carried the work to galleries far beyond Arnhem Land. A celebrated touring exhibition took its Yolngu name from the makers themselves - Gapuwiyak Miyalkurruwurr Gong Djambatjmala, the women with clever hands - and a major collection of their fibre art has even travelled to the United States. In a community reachable only by air or a weekly barge, that reach is remarkable.

Gapuwiyak is a young community by Western reckoning but an ancient one by its own. The people produce their own newsletter, Gapuwiyak Dhawu, and the rhythms of Yolngu life run beneath the surface of everyday routine. In April 2017, some five hundred people gathered at the Gapuwiyak School for a four-day festival marking the Rom - the body of law, values, beliefs, songs, language and culture that holds Yolngu society together. The young learn the Rom by taking part, alongside people of every age, and there were plans to hold the ceremony each school term. It is the kind of knowledge transfer no classroom textbook can replace: law passed hand to hand, voice to voice, across the generations.

In 1935, the Methodist missionary Harold Shepherdson was flying his small Miles Hawk over Arnhem Land when he saw the lake glinting below. He named it Lake Evella, a blend of two women's names - his wife Ella, and Eva, the wife of his fellow missionary the Reverend T.T. Webb. Shepherdson, known to many Yolngu as Bapa Sheppy, spent decades flying supplies and people across this roadless country, and his light aircraft would become a thread in the story of how scattered homelands stayed connected. The lake he spotted from the air had, of course, always been here - and always been Gapuwiyak.

Gapuwiyak exists as a community in part because a Yolngu leader willed it so. In the 1960s, David Burrumarra - a Warramiri man, philosopher and diplomat who was later appointed MBE - advocated for the settlement as part of the outstation movement, the push for Yolngu to live on and care for their own clan estates rather than be concentrated at distant missions. Today the community remains genuinely remote: a barge runs up the Buckingham River from Darwin just once a week to bring supplies. In 2018 the local health clinic moved to a community-managed model under the Miwatj Health Aboriginal Corporation - another quiet step in a long Yolngu project of running their own affairs, on their own country, in their own way.