Groote Broadcasting

The slickest dressed cabbie 🚕 in Darwin…25 years!

Some of the weekends pics from 😎

Great to catch up with Frank Yamma and Emily Wurramara! 🤩

Troy Cassar-Daley wowing the Barunga Festival crowd 🤩

Kangaroo tail 🦘 and dampers...yum! Only $5 🤪

🎙Music Spotlight | 'Gurrumul' — Dr G. Yunupingu (2008)

There are albums that entertain you. There are albums that impress you. And then, very rarely, there is an album that does something you can't quite explain — that reaches past your ears and lands somewhere deeper. 'Gurrumul' is that kind of album.
Dr Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu was a man of the Gumatj clan of northeast Arnhem Land. He was born blind, and yet as a child he taught himself guitar, keyboard, drums and didgeridoo — feeling his way through music the way others might feel their way through a dark room. By the time he recorded this debut solo album, he had already spent years performing with Yothu Yindi and the Saltwater Band. The world just didn't know his name yet.

That changed in April 2008.
Released on the independent Darwin-based Skinnyfish label, Gurrumul is sung in a mixture of Yolŋu Matha languages — Galpu, Gumatj and Djambarrpuyngu — and English. His longtime friend and producer Michael Hohnen walked a delicate line — honouring the deep cultural weight of those songs while letting them breathe for a wider audience. He got it exactly right.

Songs like Wiyathul, Djarimirri, Galiku and Wukun are hymns of praise for the Yolŋu way of honouring life — ancient stories sung gently over an acoustic guitar. There's nothing quite like it in the Australian catalogue. Nothing before. Nothing since.

The world agreed. The album sold over 200,000 copies.
Elton John personally asked Gurrumul to open his dates at the Sydney Opera House. On French television, Sting sat beside him and they performed an acoustic version of Every Breath You Take — Gurrumul gently translating the lyrics into Gumatj and stealing the whole moment without trying. That's the word that keeps coming back with this album: effortless. Every song sounds like it was always there, just waiting for someone to sing it.

At the 2008 ARIAs, the album won Best World Music Album and Best Independent Release, and Gurrumul took home three Deadlys — Artist of the Year, Album of the Year, and Single of the Year for 'Gurrumul History'.

In 2018 — a decade after its release — the album was inducted into the National Film and Sound Archive's Sounds of Australia collection, the first recording ever selected in its first year of eligibility. In 2021, Rolling Stone Australia placed it at number 20 in their 200 Greatest Australian Albums of All Time. And perhaps the simplest, most significant fact of all: it remains the best-selling Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander music album in Australian history.

Dr G. Yunupingu passed away in July 2017, aged 46. But this album — stripped back, intimate, ancient and entirely its own — will outlast all of us.

Radio Crew checking in at Groote Airport, departing for Barunga Festival with some familiar faces 😎

🏆✨ Nominations are now open for the 2026 First Nations Media Awards! ✨🏆

🎙️ First Nations Media Australia is proud to celebrate the incredible achievements, storytelling, innovation and leadership across the First Nations media industry.

🎬 The awards recognise excellence across a range of categories, including Major Awards, Content Awards and Development Awards — celebrating individuals, organisations, productions and projects making a meaningful impact across First Nations media.

📻 We’re inviting nominations from FNMA members working across radio, broadcasting, print, digital, television, film and online media platforms.

🌟 Do you know an individual, organisation, program or production making a difference in First Nations media? Now is the time to recognise and celebrate their work.

📩 Submit your nomination today and help celebrate the voices and stories shaping our industry.
https://au.entegy.events/converge26/Awards

Entries close Monday 20 July 2026

Amathea, Jaslyn and Percy are off to the Barunga Festival today!
Groote radio will be switched over to Teabba - Top End Aboriginal Bush Broadcasting Association from 4th June - Wed 11th June ...stay tuned 🙏

🎙Today, 3 June, marks one of the most significant days in Australian history.

It begins with a man called Eddie Koiki Mabo.

Eddie was born in 1936 on Mer — Murray Island — a small jewel of land in the eastern Torres Strait, homeland of the Meriam people. He grew up knowing exactly who he was, where he came from and where he belonged. His family's connection to that land wasn't something that needed to be proven. It was simply true. It had always been true.
Then one day in 1974, while working at James Cook University in Townsville, Eddie sat down with law academics and learned something that stopped him cold — under Queensland law, the Murray Islands weren't his people's land at all. They were Crown Land. The government's land.
The concept behind that? Terra nullius. Latin for "land belonging to no one."
When Britain claimed the east coast of Australia in 1770, it was on the basis that Aboriginal people had no form of political organisation, no leaders with authority, and therefore no legitimate claim to the land on which they had lived for thousands of years.
No one. The land belonged to no one.
A people who had cultivated, navigated, named, sung, mapped, governed and cared for this continent and its surrounding islands for 65,000 years — simply declared invisible. Not by accident. By law.
Eddie Mabo decided that law was wrong. And he was going to prove it.
In May 1982, Eddie and four fellow Meriam people — Reverend David Passi, Sam Passi, James Rice and Celuia Mapo Sale — began legal proceedings to assert their right to their traditional lands. What followed was a decade-long legal battle that tested every one of them.
Eddie had said it plainly: "It is my father's and grandfather's, grandmother's land. I am related to it. It is my identity. That's why I need to fight for it, so I don't lose my identity to the land."

He fought for ten years. He never stopped.
On 3 June 1992, the High Court announced its historic decision — five months after Eddie Mabo had passed away. He never heard the verdict.
But the verdict came.
Six of the seven High Court judges upheld the claim. The Meriam people were ruled to be entitled to possession, occupation, use and enjoyment of the lands of the Murray Islands. Terra nullius was overturned.
In doing so, the court didn't just find in favour of the Meriam people — it applied the same principles to Australia as a whole, upending legal foundations that had stood for 204 years and retelling the history of Australian colonisation itself.

The law finally caught up with the truth that First Nations people had always known. They were never invisible. Their law was always real. Their connection to Country was never broken — not by a proclamation, not by a legal fiction, not by 204 years of being told otherwise.
The following year, the Native Title Act 1993 was passed — providing the framework for all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to make claims of native title over their traditional lands.

Eddie Mabo didn't live to see it. But his name is now woven into the legal and moral fabric of this country forever.
Today we remember him. We remember the Meriam people. And we remember what becomes possible when one person refuses to accept a lie — no matter how long it has been written into law.