Yolngu is not the name of a clan but the word the Aboriginal people of northeast Arnhem Land use for themselves. The peninsula is held by traditional owners across several clans, the Gumatj, Rirratjingu, Djapu, Madarrpa and Dhalwangu chief among them, who maintain unbroken ties to land, law and religion. They call non-Indigenous people balanda, a word that most likely travelled here from 'Hollander', a trace of the Macassan fishermen and traders who visited these shores for centuries before any European settlement. The region has produced national figures, among them the educator and linguist Raymattja Marika, who was named Northern Territory Australian of the Year in 2007. Across the peninsula, traditional homelands and outstations remain home to families living on their own country.

In the 1950s, Commonwealth surveyors found something beneath this country worth a fortune: a bauxite deposit covering some 65 square kilometres and holding an estimated 250 million tonnes of the ore that becomes aluminium. The discovery would reshape the peninsula. The government set up a mining venture, Nabalco, and granted it a lease that came with a promise to build a town, a port and a refinery. The mine and its town, Nhulunbuy, rose on Aboriginal land. For the Yolngu, who had not been consulted, the development was an intrusion into sacred country, and their response would reverberate through Australian law for the next half-century.

When the bark petitions of 1963 failed to stop the mine, the Yolngu took their claim to court. In Milirrpum v Nabalco, the Gove land rights case decided in April 1971, clan leaders argued they held a communal title to their country that no one had ever lawfully extinguished. Justice Richard Blackburn accepted that Yolngu had a detailed system of law, including rules about land, but ruled it carried no weight in Australian law, and the claim failed. It was a bitter defeat. Yet the judgment proved impossible to ignore. It pushed the Whitlam government to set up the Woodward Royal Commission, which led directly to the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976, and the case was finally overturned by the High Court's Mabo decision in 1992. The loss at Gove helped win the larger war.

For decades the peninsula's cash economy revolved around the refinery, later owned by Rio Tinto. Then, in November 2013, the company announced it would shut the alumina refinery, though not the bauxite mine, by mid-2014. Around 1,100 jobs vanished, close to a quarter of the town's population, and the planes out of Gove began flying half empty. The closure exposed how much a company town depends on a single ledger. But the Yolngu communities and homelands that predate the mine by millennia did not depend on it, and they endured. The bauxite that drew the world's attention was never the peninsula's deepest wealth.

Culture here is not a museum piece but daily practice. Each August, on Gumatj country at Gulkula, the Garma Festival draws thousands from across Australia and the world to learn from Yolngu music, dance, art and ceremony, and to debate the nation's future. Art centres on the peninsula, Buku-Larrnggay Mulka at Yirrkala foremost among them, send work to galleries worldwide. The waters off the coast, prized by sailors threading Australia's north, teem with the same turtles, barramundi and stingrays the eight seasons track. For all the upheaval the bauxite brought, the peninsula remains, first and last, Yolngu country, lived as it has always been lived: by the land's own calendar.