The Bulu Line is a collection of 17 nurlu songs, and 3 dances, from the West Kimberley. Nurlu songpoetry is one of three key genres of song in the West Kimberley region.

The foremost consists of the poetry that forms part of ritual and contains vital knowledge about history, philosophy, and social and ecological relationships. A second major, and rapidly growing, genre consists of music like hip-hop and country & western. Like this second genre, nurlu are relatively ‘young’ songs. But they are distinguished from Western styles because they arrive in people’s dreams (i.e. they’re not ‘composed’ in the conventional sense of the term). Unlike the first genre, however, they don’t come from ancient times. Instead, their composition is attributed to various spirits, either balangan (spirits of the dead) or rai (child-like forms that cause pregnancy).

The translation of this collection attempts to capture the dynamic phrasing in the lines of a nurlu performance that result from the same material being repeated with a shifting melodic start point, changing the way in which the words appear to be grouped and therefore the corresponding semantic meaning. So while a songpoem may feature only three lines of text, the variable groupings of those three lines in succession can result in a variety of meanings.

GEORGE DYUŊGAYAN, born 1900 in Goolarabooloo, was a Nyigina lawman blessed with extraordinary gifts. As a maban (‘clever man’), Dyuŋgayan was not only able to produce songpoetry of incredible beauty and power, but he had the ability to see and control things that others couldn’t. The Bulu Line came from the spirit of his late father, Bulu, in a series of dreams across many years.