The Yirrkala Bark Petition was an important step on the road to land rights in the Northern Territory. Yolngu took the Commonwealth Government and the mining company NABALCO to court in 1971 over the granting of a mining lease over their land. Although they lost that case, it was the catalyst for the Woodward Commission into Aboriginal Land Rights, which eventually resulted in the Aboriginal Land Rights Act (Northern Territory) 1976.

Although the Land Rights Act granted Yolngu ownership of their land down to the low watermark, it left certain areas of their tenure unclear—in particular, ownership of the intertidal zone. Yolngu are dependant on the resources of the sea and shore for much of their livelihood and the majority of today’s settlements are coastal. In the 1990s, Yolngu again sensed a threat to their land ownership as a result of leases being granted for fishing and crabbing enterprises that included the intertidal zone. Matters were brought to a head in 1996 when Yolngu found the severed head of a crocodile in a temporary camp of barramundi fishermen near Garrangali in the top of Blue Mud Bay. The place where the head was found was associated with Bäru, the ancestral crocodile. Bäru is a creative ancestor of the Madarrpa clan and the clan’s leader was Djambawa Marawili. Djambawa was a leading artist and was at the time chairman of the Buku Larrnggay Mulka artists’ centre at Yirrkala. Interestingly, it was the Madarrpa clan that was not included in the paintings of the Church Panels. In this case, Djambawa too responded not as an individual but as a member of the community of interconnected clans along the coast from Blue Mud Bay to Melville Bay.

As a result of a number of meetings, Yolngu artists and clan leaders decided to produce a series of paintings that represented different clan countries along the coast, asserting their historic rights over the land and sea. On this occasion, rather than remaining on display in Yirrkala, the paintings became a travelling exhibition, accompanied by a detailed catalogue documenting the meanings and localities represented. The paintings were eventually acquired by the Australian National Maritime Museum as part of its permanent collection.

The making of the Saltwater Collection signalled Yolngu concern about their rights to the intertidal zone—a concern that resulted in them bringing a case before the Federal Court under the Native Title Act 1993 and the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976. The production of the collection of paintings provided an Indigenous mechanism for community action that could be transformed into a body of evidence and used in the Australian legal framework.^[8] The paintings embodied and encoded people’s relationship to land and required that they exercise their traditional laws and customs on a regional basis, and the exercise of those laws and customs was in turn a demonstration of native title rights under Australian law. As a consequence, during the hearings of the case in the Federal Court, examples of the Saltwater paintings were used as evidence and incorporated in witness statements. The legal action on this occasion was successful and the claim over the waters of the intertidal zone was finally recognised by a decision of the High Court in July 2008.