Iterating the world of a Nyigina lawman : matters resolved, obscured and arising

Book review of Gularabulu: Stories from the West Kimberley, by Paddy Roe. Paddy Roe OAM (c. 1912–2001) was a senior Nyigina custodian of Australia’s West Kimberley who after working as a drover and a windmill mechanic, emerged from the pastoral industry and mid-twentieth-century ‘welfare’ years of government policy as an esteemed cultural mentor and mediator. Gularabulu, a book of his stories regarding the recent history, Dreaming (Bugarrigarra), and supernatural events of the north-west, was originally released in 1983 by Fremantle Arts Centre Press. On the wave of Indigenous, orally based life-writing which it helped to inspire, Gularabulu’s journey during the intervening period has been from the position of an experimental outlier in a new field of literature to that of a seminal work in a well-established genre of Australian Indigenous life-writing.