On Tuesday this week, a select crew were invited by former NT Chief Minister Shane Stone and Galarrwuy Yunupingu’s advisor Sean Bowden to Schooner’s Restaurant at Darwin’s up-market Cullen Bay to hear the good news about a joint venture mining agreement between the two former sworn enemies, now business partners.

It was supposed to be a backgrounder for selected journalists to meet and greet with Yunupingu and Stone on the subject of their new bauxite mining joint-venture in Yunupingu’s home country near to Yirrkala in north-east Arnhem land.

Not so long ago, Stone, then NT Chief Minister, and Yunupingu, as Northern Land Council Chairman, were the two most powerful men in the NT. And they hated each other’s guts, Stone describing Yunupingu as “just another whingeing, whining, carping black”, Yunupingu hitting back by describing Stone as “just another redneck”.

What a difference 12 years and few million dollars can make.

Now, according to the NT News, they are the best of friends, united now to run the baby mining venture, Dhupuma Resources, to exploit an unknown quantity of bauxite on the Yunupingu clan lands next to the Rio Tinto-owned Alcan mine.

Invitees to the lunch included all of The Australian‘s local scribblers, a couple from Fairfax and the ABC, local restaurateur and raconteur Paul Costigan (of the Melbourne Costigans), NT Chief Minister Paul Henderson’s Chief of Staff Adele Young and an assorted crew of hangers-on and minor worthies.

And, apparently because Yunupingu couldn’t make it, no announcement about the mine was made. Elsewhere it might be a case of ‘OK, thanks for the lunch… see you later’. But we do things differently in the NT.

Territorians love a good stink, and among this select group there were at least two long-standing grudges that, stirred up by a bit of monsoonal heat and lashings of grog, could very likely bust open like a tropical ulcer under the armpit.

One of those potential stoushes arose from the portrayal during the NT election in July this year, by The Australian‘s Natasha Robinson of Adele Young as: “…the bovver-girl and policy powerhouse of the Territory Government, not afraid of launching verbal tirades on the telephone to backbenchers who step out of line. The decision to place the Inpex gas plant front and centre of this election campaign has Ms Young’s fingerprints all over it.”

The other potential source of stink would be the meeting of The Australian‘s ‘chief’ in the NT, Paul Toohey, and other journalists still bitter over Toohey’s comments about them in an article earlier this year.

That article detailed Toohey’s reaction, described in March this year by Crikey‘s Margaret Simons as a ‘dummy-spit‘, to the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance’s draft policy on journalists entering townships on Aboriginal land in the NT.

As Simons wrote in Crikey at the time:

Rumblings up north. The reporters are fighting. But are there grave issues of journalistic principle at stake, or is it more a matter of political posturing in the public eye? “This is a stunt by Toohey. I guess its about the byline and publicity.” So said Northern Territory-based Fairfax journalist Lindsay Murdoch to Crikey this morning about Paul Toohey’s dummy spit in The Australian. Toohey announced today that he is returning his Walkley Award to the Media Arts and Entertainment Alliance in protest at a proposed new code on reporting Aboriginal communities.

This Tuesday Toohey had better things to do and went elsewhere. But Crikey understands that Adele Young challenged Natasha Robinson on her article and that less-than-kind words were exchanged. Crikey also understands that Toohey’s future as The Australian‘s local ‘chief’ was the subject of extensive, and apparently bemused, discussion.

And at this time of year, the sense of Christmas cheer can be infectious, particularly when it is helped along by more than a few bottles of good red. Crikey understands that, for two of the lunch-goers at least, new bonds of physical and emotional attachment have been forged. Apparently some at the table were less than pleased by the nature and content of the mutual admiration on display and this caused the participants to move to more comfortable quarters elsewhere.

Leaving Mr Stone to pick up most of the substantial tab.