Paddy Roe OAM (1912 – 2001), also known as Lulu, was a Nyikina (also spelled Nyigina) Aboriginal man born and raised in the bush by his tribal father, Bulu, and mother, Wallia, at Roebuck Plains on Yawuru country in the remote West Kimberley region of Western Australia.
[6] Though speaking seven Aboriginal languages plus Malay and ‘Broome English’, he chose not to learn to read or write, saying it inhibited the unimpeded flow of ‘true feeling’, namely, the knowing emanating from, in his words, the ground at "the bottom of everything.”[7] When Bulu passed away, Lulu was still a young boy and the family decided to safeguard him from the dangers of the encroaching colonialists by sending him into the desert, beyond their reach.
The 31-year collaboration extended well beyond Lulu’s lifetime, culminating with the 2022 book Total Reset: Realigning with our timeless holistic blueprint for living[10] and 36-hour audiobook narrated by Nyikina man, accomplished actor and creative, Mark Coles Smith.
It is why the old people began walking young Lulu and Mary back and forth through Country (from Broome to Gariyan, south of Carnot Bay) showing them the hundreds of sites along the coast, sharing the associated songs and stories, introducing them to the mamara trees and murruru places (flora and rocks with special power) and providing other essential cultural information.
[16] As the West Kimberley came under increasing pressure from developers, miners and tourism, Lulu’s recognised authority to speak for Country meant many of those who wanted to know what might be possible came to his ‘office’, a tamarind tree in Dora Street, Broome where they would find him sitting beneath its shade on the red pindan carving boomerangs, shields and lizards or making decorations for ceremonies.
[22] Lulu’s commitment to preserving Country from harm was illustrated in 1990 when the listed mining company, Terex Resources NL, sought approval to exploit mineral sands on the sacred domain of the Songline.
[23] In the 1980s, Lulu began talking about his vision of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people walking together, camping under the stars and experiencing the power of Living Country and the ways of traditional culture.
He dreamed of a walking trail as a means of uniting and uplifting Indigenous and non-Indigenous people alike through the agency of Country, which in turn would provide a way for it to be cared for respectfully.
[24] Lulu’s vision manifested in 1987 with the first walk of the Lurujarri Heritage Trail, two or three happening every year thereafter and continued by his descendants today, usually comprising 20-30 visitors and 20-30 Goolarabooloo men, women and children.
[25] The Trail traverses an 80-kilometre section of coast, part of a 450-kilometre-long Songline that winds its way from Swan Point on the northern tip of the Dampier Peninsula to Gariyan (Cape Bossut), south of the Karajarri community of Bidyadanga.
For tens of thousands of years, the members of its seven communities have continued the ceremonies in which the Country of the Songline is sung and renewed and knowledge of First Law[26] transmitted intergenerationally.
[27] In turn, this led to the WA Museum’s Aboriginal Sites Department commissioning archaeologists Elizabeth Bradshaw and Rachel Fry to carry out the first fully professional survey of the entire coastal strip of the Lurujarri Heritage Trail, from Broome to Bindingangun (Yellow Creek).
[28] In 1993, Emeritus Professor Jim Sinatra, head of RMIT University’s Landscape Architecture program in Melbourne, joined Lulu and the Goolarabooloo people in walking the Trail.
Sinatra was so impressed by the opportunity it afforded for people to see and know the natural world in a different way that walking the Trail became a course of study for landscape architecture and design students at RMIT, and remains so today.
His name was Paddy Poe (who) established the Goolarabooloo community to protect the region’s Indigenous culture (leading) to the construction in 1987 of the Lurujarri (coastal dunes) Heritage Trail…As Mr Roe said, “We should all come together – European and Aboriginal people, Countryman and Aboriginal man, Black and White – to look after Country”… Despite the history of this one significant man in the Kimberley who has contributed so much to his community, I think that he ought to be remembered as a person who contributed so much to the Australian nation.
"[32] The enduring impact of that legacy was evident not only in the continuance of the Lurujarri HeritageTrail walks but also in a remarkable struggle by the Goolarabooloo people (2005-2013) to prevent the industrialisation of the land of the Songline when several of the world’s largest corporations sought to build a massive LNG plant at Walmadany (James Price Point) and a port.
The book features 31 Aboriginal writers, painters, dancers and storytellers from western, central and eastern Australia, including Paddy Roe, Jack Davis, Archie Weller and Sally Morgan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGZK0v3JaEo • Video: Protecting the Songlines, sixth episode in the 2015 Canadian television Native Planet series about Indigenous cultures, hosted by Simon Baker.