Phone reception isn’t the best in Yurruwi. Text messages need to beam in from across the vast salt-kissed, lowlying archipelago that is the Crocodile Islands, almost 500 kilometres out of Darwin in East Arnhem Land. Nevertheless, when 22-year-old Yolngu model Tarlisa Gaykamangu received one asking if she would like to front Vogue Australia, her second ever shoot, her first ever cover, the reply that came back was clear: yes. “I was really excited,” she says, deep brown eyes flashing.
She’s in Sydney, flown in from Milingimbi Island, as Yurruwi is also known, and is wearing some of the few winter clothes she owns; bathed in tropical heat and skirted by the aquamarine waters of the Arafura Sea, average temperatures in Milingimbi don’t vary much from 30 degrees Celsius. She bought these, not for a relatively mild Sydney winter, but for freezing Milan where another life-changing phone call took
