Yorro Yorro

Sitting in a rock shelter in the Kimberley, David Mowaljarlai watches bees circling a shrub. An elder and lawman of the Ngarinyin people, he has spent his life tending a land shaped by the creative spirits, the Wandjina, in the first times. Yet these bees are not ancient—they were born yesterday, and still they are the same. “The same swarms, the same communities,” he observes—the same swarms, the same communities, though not the original bees—and in that moment, he says, the missing piece of his riddle fell into place.

English

Yorro Yorro is ongoing, everything standing up alive.

English

Yorro Yorro is continual: everything stands up, alive.

The word is doubled—yorro, then yorro again—and this doubling is not emphasis, but meaning itself. Where French consigns “creation” to the past, as an accomplished fact whose result we inhabit, Ngarinyin keeps it in the continuous present. Wallanganda, the creative spirit, made “all the things of nature”; but his gestures, Mowaljarlai specifies, are still Yorro Yorro—the nature that renews itself in every form, without interruption. Creation is not behind us. It is happening now.

The bees, then, are not a metaphor: they are the demonstration. None of today’s bees is the original bee; as individuals die, others hatch, queens succeed one another, swarms disperse. And yet the “Hive System” established in the first times has never ceased to be there, identical to itself through this flux. Permanence is not the immobility of a thing: it is the continuity of a beginning again. That is what the word holds—a world that endures because it remakes itself, not in spite of it.

We must be careful not to hear in this our own creation story, merely transposed beneath the Australian sun. Genesis sets creation in the past tense: God created, then rested, and the work was sealed behind us. Yorro Yorro does not rest and does not close; it has no seventh day. This is not a beginning we commemorate, but a present we sustain—the law entrusts the land to its guardians precisely so that the Idea of the Wandjina “continues.” Where we conjugate creation as a completed event, Mowaljarlai conjugates it as a task that is never finished. Each morning, the world stands up anew; it remains for us to hold it upright with it.