NURLU
Amy Ireland
The nurlu is a multimedia ritual technology native to the West Kimberly region in Northern Australia that functions as a channel between local spirits and living members of
the indigenous communities, often for purposes of testifying to the latter’s possession
of magical powers and for the transmission of important messages. Nurlu are procured
via psychosonic transmission and typically comprise a sequence of vocal and rhythmic
components communicated during dreams or other altered states of consciousness to
a maban or shaman—a member of the community especially sensitive to the machinations of the spirit world, credited (in the words of Gularabulu elder Paddy Roe) with
having ‘one more eye’ than everybody else.1 Although the recipients of these missives
are assigned ownership over them, they can be passed on or traded between groups,
becoming standard elements of regional culture. A nurlu may only have one custodian
at a time and continuing interventions from the spirit—or balangan—may expand the
number of components that make up a series, rendering the form open-ended and
relatively mutable. In this way, transmission follows two lines: one esoteric, one exoteric,
both regulated by specific codes of diffusion.
The content of a nurlu is representative of a broader tendency in Indigenous Australian culture to inscribe all modulations of being—inorganic/organic, animal/human,
presence/absence, living/dead—on a continuum, often describing a transformation
that crosses these temporary thresholds, facilitated by dance and song. The spectral
gradient invoked here is spatial rather than temporal, with the dead always present
alongside the living, and able to pass information between the two realms—and
even occasionally manifest—through the living nodes provided by the maban men.
1.
K. Benterrak, S. Muecke, and P. Roe, Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology [1984] (Melbourne: re.press,
2014).
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This spectral realm, a consistent component of Indigenous lore, is known as bugarrigarra (the Dreaming), and operates as a timeless, virtual reservoir from which all
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beings—human and nonhuman—are incarnated and to which they return. Especially
volatile zones of traffic are indexed to physical places in the Australian landscape, a
fact that underwrites the distinct intensity of the Indigenous Australian connection
to country. Nurlu can be situated in a more specific context of belief revolving around
the rayi (conception spirits) and maban traditions prevalent in the Kimberlies and the
Western Desert communities.
Two of the most complex local nurlu are Marinydyirinyi (‘opening up the grave’), the
nurlu of Butcher Joe (Nangan), and Bulu, the nurlu of George Dyunggayan, named for
his father’s spirit. Marinydyirinyi and Bulu are made up of a series of over fifty songs
and twenty dances, and seventeen songs and three dances respectively, and are performed with a combination of voice, clap sticks, and body percussion with dancers clad
in wangararra (totemic head gear representing the spirit who has communicated the
nurlu) in an ‘open’ context, viewable by all members of the community.2 Marinydyirinyi
was first communicated to Butcher Joe by a balangan named Dyabiya, the spirit of
his deceased Aunty, while Joe was a young man living at Dyarrmangunan sheep camp
on Roebuck Plains Station. It depicts the opening of her grave at Wayikurrkurr by a
group of rayi, and her subsequent journey through the spirit world. During the dream
visitations in which the nurlu was bequeathed to Butcher Joe, Dyabiya bestowed the
Pelican Being (mayarda) on him as a personal jalnga—a spirit familiar—that would
become the totemic symbol for Marinydyirinyi. The headgear worn by Butcher Joe
during performances of Marinydyirinyi alludes to a pelican’s bill, and the ritual enacts
a transformative perforation of thresholds between Joe in human form, Joe dancing
his mayarda, and the path traversed by his Aunty as she leaves her grave and crosses
into the spirit realm, where she will become a balangan. All of the sites that appear in
Butcher Joe’s nurlu are real, physical spaces in the local landscape that work—as in
all nurlu—to link the song cycle with a specific sense of place.
In Bulu, setting carries a similar, highly spiritualized charge. Dyunggayan’s nurlu
was conveyed to him by rayi and the spirit of his dead father, Bulu, and many of its
songs centre around Wanydyal—a local waterhole where Bulu’s balangan still resides.
2.
Some nurlu series terminate with a wirdu (‘big’ or ‘final’) song, possibly carrying encoded esoteric information not
originally meant for the open context, but these restrictions may have been obsolesced in the West Kimberly communities.
See R. Keogh, ‘Nurlu, Songs of the West Kimberleys’, PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, 1990, 34n13.
The earliest ‘lines’ of Bulu describe a journey undertaken by the spirit forms of
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Dyunggayan, Bulu, and the accompanying rayi from the waterhole across Nyigina and
a comet and the magical production of various kinds of rain phenomena (rainbows,
bizarrely shaped and ‘sickness-bearing’ clouds, storms, and the conjuring of rainbow
serpents). These latter are associated with the power of the waterhole—an integral
part of bugarrigarra teachings—and the capacity of maban men like Dyunggayan to
harness this power for magical purposes.4
Musical characteristics of the form vary from region to region. However, all nurlu
share a repetitive, cyclical, incantatory structure that is highly conducive to phasing
patterns, whereby melodic and rhythmic elements fall in and out of synchronization with
one another, enhancing the form’s amenability to trance-like states in its performers and
audience. Nurlu also have in common the use of ‘song language’, a complex system of
syllabic variation generated by adding specific groups of affixes and suffixes to the text
to alter its rhythmic structure and imbue it with supplementary layers of meaning.5 This
variability of interpretation is amplified by the obfuscation of the subject of the action
in most texts via the limited use, or deliberate omission, of pronouns. The opacity and
ambiguity of nurlu texts is often commented upon and can be linked to an economy
of exoteric and esoteric knowledge transmission. Nurlu texts never appear in written
form and, when sung, support multiple phonic parsings. Importantly, these embedded
levels of meaning are not in conflict with each other, rather they operate as a mutually
supportive complex of nested information whose significance varies depending on the
knowledge of its interpreter.6
As in Marinydyirinyi and Bulu, nurlu generally include dramatizations of their own
inaugurating moments of transmission and reception, overtly situating the creative
act in a threshold space beyond the intentionality of an individual, human subject.
Rather, the custodian of a nurlu functions as a resonator—a xenopoetic vessel—for
the transmission of information across different ontological zones and varying levels of
3.
Nurlu are generally episodic in structure. ‘Lines’ are subsets of songs and dances that relate to the same dream
experience (Keogh, ‘Nurlu’, 31–2).
4.
Paddy Roe relates a legend in which Dyunggaya is called upon to use his powers in a magical battle with a maban
from a neighbouring region who has sent a pair of rainbow serpents to drown the inhabitants of the sheep camp where
Dyungaya happens to be working (Keogh, ‘Nurlu’, 44–5).
5.
Some rhythmic constructions carry specific associations that can be decoded by a knowledgeable listener, and
patterns that are similar to one another often have related meanings (Keogh, ‘Nurlu’, 81).
6.
Keogh, ‘Nurlu’, 78–89.
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Warrwa country.3 Later lines concern meteorological events, including the passing of
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esoteric significance. Their public performances act as a method of ritual reinforcement
and collective maintenance of these connections, grounding continuity between the
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living and the dead in the incantatory nature of rhythm and song, and the wordless
intensity of the land itself.