Paddy Roe
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. Widely respected for his wisdom and cultural knowledge, he was an acknowledged advocate of reconciliation.[1] His conception totem (jalnga) was Yungurugu (or Yoongoorookoo),[2] the Rainbow Serpent. He had strong maban power.[3]
He was the apical ancestor of the Goolarabooloo people[4] and the founder of the Lurujarri Heritage Trail[5] on the West Kimberley's Dampier Peninsula. (part of the Heritage Trails Network 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 his father 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. He was accompanied by his older tribal brother and lifelong mentor, the widely renowned maban man Joe Nangan[8] and several other family members. They re-emerged eight years later, Lulu now a fully initiated Lawman having been taken into the Law at an unusually young age and passing through all the stages. The returnees camped on Roebuck Plains, which had become a cattle station, and cared for the last of the old Nyikina people while working as station hands. Lulu was soon an accomplished drover and installer/repairer of windmills, so dependable he was left in charge of the station when the manager was on holidays.[9]
Though illiterate, he collaborated with non-Indigenous people in writing several books. The first, Gularabulu: Stories from the West Kimberley, was published in collaboration with Professor Stephen Muecke. It won the Western Australian Week Literary Award in 1985, and the New South Wales Premier's Literary Award the same year.
In 1991, Greg Campbell was invited by Lulu to live on Country and work with him and the Goolarabooloo people to write one book designed to share key elements of the original knowledge (First Law) for people to live in balance with themselves, one another and the world around them. 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.
Roe was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in the 1990 Australia Day Honours for "service to Aboriginal welfare".[11].
Works
[edit]• Greg Campbell with Lulu and the Goolarabooloo Family, Total Reset: Realigning with our timeless holistic blueprint for living. 2022, (1st ed. rev., 2023). Dunsborough, WA: Total Reset Publishing.
• Stephen Muecke & Paddy Roe, The Children’s Country: Creation of a Goolarabooloo Future in North-West Australia. 2020. London: Rowman & Littlefield
• Kim Akerman. Brief Notes - Paddy Roe and the Goolarabooloo (Native Title) Findings. 2018. In the private collection of the Goolarabooloo Millibinyarri Indigenous Corporation (GMIC) and published in Total Reset (1st ed. rev. 2023, Appendix 3).
• Jim Sinatra and Phin Murphy, Listen to the People, Listen to the Land, 1999 Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. The 1st chapter (pp.11-30) focuses on Paddy Roe and the Goolarabooloo family.
• Liz Thompson (compiler), Aboriginal Voices: Contemporary Aboriginal artists, writers and performers. 1990. Simon & Schuster, Australia. The book features 31 Aboriginal writers, painters, dancers and story-tellers from western, central and eastern Australia including Paddy Roe, Jack Davis, Archie Weller and Sally Morgan.
• Krim Benterrak, Stephen Muecke and Paddy Roe, Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology. 1984. Revised edition 1996 by Fremantle Arts Centre Press; 2014 edition by re.Press
• Paddy Roe (Stephen Muecke editor), Gularabulu: Stories from the West Kimberley. 1983. South Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press.
References
[edit]- ^ See speech by Senator Aden Ridgeway in the Parliament of Australia’s Hansard (Senate) transcript of 20 August 2001. https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id%3A%22chamber%2Fhansards%2F2001-08-20%2F0169%22;src1=sm1
- ^ RiverOfLife, M., Pelizzon, A., Poelina, A., Akhtar-Khavari, A., Clark, C., Laborde, S., Macpherson, E., O’Bryan, K., O’Donnell, E., & Page, J. (2021). Yoongoorrookoo: The emergence of ancestral personhood. Griffith Law Review, 30(3), 505–529. https://doi.org/10.1080/10383441.2021.199 6882,
- ^ Maban is the name used by Aboriginal people of the West Kimberley for a man who has access to supernatural powers of one or more ancestral beings of the Dreaming and has been endowed with the ability to utilise those powers in a variety of ways, usually in support of community well-being. The name of the female equivalent is janggungurr. Across Australia, there are a variety of names for maban such as karadji, gingin, kurdaitcha and bán-man. Commonly known as a ‘clever man’, a maban is also referred to in the literature as a ‘medicine man’ or ‘doctor’ though their functions are much broader. In the Americas, Siberia and other places, the equivalent is a shaman.
- ^ Goolarabooloo (Goolara = west coast/sundown/seaside; booloo = people/place) is both a generic name for saltwater societies of the West Kimberley region of Western Australia and the name of the community whose apical ancestors are Paddy Roe and his wife Mary Pikalili. The spelling ‘Goolarabooloo’ is in current general use by its members and the broader society. In his 1940s work, archaeologist-anthropologist Norman Tindale referred to the Goolarabooloo as the Kularapulu. Daisy Bates, in her 1899-1902 fieldwork called them the Koolarrbulloo and the Koolarabooloo. A 1983 book attributed to Paddy Roe (Stephen Muecke editor) is titled Gularabulu.
- ^ https://www.goolarabooloo.org.au/lurujarri.html
- ^ https://www.alltrails.com/trail/australia/western-australia/lurujarri-heritage-trail
- ^ Total Reset: Realigning with our timeless holistic blueprint for living, p.x.
- ^ Ethnologist Dr Helmut Petri, leader of the 1938 German Frobenius expedition to the Kimberley, wrote of Joe Nangan, “From his earliest youth he had been regarded in the whole northwest as a maban wánggu-djáding, a medicine man of the first rank”. See Pawsey, M. (trans.) & Akerman, K. (ed.) 2015 Cologne to the Kimberley: Studies of Aboriginal Life in Northwest Australia by Five German Scholars in the First Half of the 20th Century. Carlisle, Western Australia: Hesperian Press.
- ^ The Children's Country: Creation of a Goolarabooloo Future in North-West Australia
- ^ The printed book and the 2023 audiobook by Mark Coles Smith can be previewed at http://www.totalreset.com.au
- ^ "Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) entry for Paddy Roe". Australian Honours Database. Canberra, Australia: Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. 1990. Retrieved 6 July 2015.
Medal/Australia Day 1990. For service to Aboriginal welfare
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