By Cameron Woodhead
Gularabulu
Paddy Roe
Gularabulu. By Paddy Roe
University of Western Australia Press, $22.99
When these stories and song-poems from the West Kimberley were first published in the 1980s, there was nothing else like them. Paddy Roe, a Nyigina elder from near Broome, built one of the first bridges between Aboriginal oral culture and non-Indigenous readers. Transcribed by Professor Stephen Muecke, who offers an introduction to this volume, Gularabulu offers a window into a world that merges timeless myth and contemporary reality, through the tangible and immediate rhythms of speech and song. In Mirdinan, for instance, a shape-changing wife-killer is hunted down by elders and police, who strip him of his powers by getting him drunk. This is challenging and beguiling to read, and an important milestone in Australian literature.