Purpose: Self-determination policies and the expansion of bilingual schooling across Australia's Northern Territory (NT) in the 1970s and 1980s provided opportunities for Aboriginal educators and communities to take control over schooling. This paper demonstrates how this occurred at Shepherdson College, a mission school turned government bilingual school, at Galiwin'ku on Elcho Island in North East, Arnhem Land, in the early years of the policies between 1972 and 1983. Yolnu staff developed a syncretic vision for a Yolnu-controlled space of education that prioritised Yolnu knowledges and aimed to sustain Yolnu existence. Design/methodology/approach: This paper uses archival data as well as oral histories, focusing on those with a close involvement with Shepherdson College, to elucidate the development of a Yolnu vision for schooling. Findings: Many Yolnu school staff and their supporters, encouraged by promises of the era, pushed for greater Yolnu control over staffing, curriculum, school spaces and governance. The budgetary and administrative control of the NT and federal governments acted to hinder possibilities. Yet despite these bureaucratic challenges, by the time of the shift towards neoliberal constraints in the early 1980s, Yolnu educators and their supporters had envisioned and achieved, in a nascent way, a Yolnu schooling system. Originality/value: Previous scholarship on bilingual schooling has not closely examined the potent link between self-determination and bilingual schooling, largely focusing on pedagogical debates. Instead, this paper argues that Yolnu embraced the "way in" offered by bilingual schooling to develop a new vision for community control through control of schooling.