George Dyuŋgayan was a powerful Nyigina lawman from the Roebuck Plains (east of Broome). Over the course of a life spanning much of the twentieth century, the spirit of his late father visited him in dreams and gave him the seventeen verses of the The Bulu Line. Full of magic and local history, the poems describe journeys with ancestors and spirit beings, encounters with rainbow serpents and ferocious storms, and explore the vast distances of the West Kimberley landscape.

A pioneering experiment in contemporary Australian literature, George Dyuŋgayan’s The Bulu Line is the translation of a richly textured oral poetry into printed form. Rather than reduce the songpoetry to short, static lines of verse, Stuart Cooke has assembled a series of startling multi-vocal texts that invite a plethora of never-ending readings. Just like Cooke, you can also become a translator, and contribute to the performance of the poetry. In this way, writes Cooke in the introduction, we “let the force of the Bulu keep rolling.”