Speaking at the 2007 Garma Festival, deep in the heart of a stringybark forest in north-east Arnhem Land, former Northern Land Council president, Galarrwuy Yunupingu, called on people to fight the Howard Government's takeover of Northern Territory Aboriginal communities.
"I have got a political agenda to run," he said.
"This government is a worrying government, not worried about us but worried about himself (Prime Minister John Howard) and worried about his few rich people and business people that support the coalition that puts them back into government to run amok in the nation."
Aboriginal leaders, politicians, academics, judges and artists have gathered at Gulkula, a dry community close to the mining town of Nhulunbuy, for Australia's leading indigenous festival.
Now in its ninth year, the theme of this year's festival is Indigenous Health: Real Solutions for a Chronic Problem.
But Canberra's unprecedented emergency intervention to combat child sexual abuse following a damning NT government report took centre stage on the first day of the four-day event.
"We in the Northern Territory are about to be dispossessed of everything, everything that we've got left from the original dispossession of our land and lives.
"That I should go and change my lifestyle and become a white man is worrying, worrying and sickening."
Mr Yunupingu called the federal government move "the lowest of anybody's form of policy".
"I am just reminding people that this is a struggle.
"I appeal to you to stand beside us to fight the rottenness that is ... the sickness of this government setting out to simply take away what's rightfully ours."
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