It’s almost seven years now since the London-based Australian filmmaker Ben Strunin began researching the life and times of one of northern Australia’s most compelling characters, Djalu Gurruwiwi.

In north-east Arnhem Land, the home of the Yolngu people, spirituality, story, magic, song and visual art all coalesce as the basis of one of the richest and most enduring of the world’s cultures. The past is never far from the present and belief is the close brother of truth.

The Yolngu world has come to heavily instruct how I (a white bloke of Irish ancestry who grew up with no consciousness of Indigenous Australia) have come to view and write about my country’s hidden history – both its brutal and magical past. My contact with Yolngu has also influenced my spiritual beliefs and my attitudes to life and death. It’s a world I enter appreciatively, as a humbled visitor, when I can. I always feel better about the world and this life when I leave.

But back to Djalu, who might be 80. Or he might well be 90. Nobody is precisely sure when he was born. He holds vivid recollections of being with his father, the Yolngu warrior Monyu, as the Japanese war planes dropped their bombs on his land. He tells stories, too, of fighting the Japanese with his father and of Monyu beheading his tribal enemies.

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Later, in more peaceful post-war times, Djalu would work side by side with the Japanese pearlers.

The year before last, together with the filmmakers and a group of Australian artists, including Wally De Backer (aka Gotye), I accompanied Djalu on a trip to one of his childhood homes, the now deserted (beside an overprotective rainbow serpent and, according to some, a mutant gorilla; another story) island of Raragala in the Arafura Sea. There Djalu saw a man clutching his own severed head in his hand. It was one of the men his father, Monyu, had long ago killed.

The departed, like the past, are ever present in the Yolngu world.

It is said that Djalu, too, was once a feared enforcer of tribal law. Again, who but Djalu really knows? For Djalu’s past eight or nine decades, whether traceable and provable in the way we Balanda – white outsiders – like to tell our own history, are no less or more important to the Yolngu than the 40,000 or 50,000 preceding years of happenings and the stories grown from them.

In a place where stories about the creationist animals are as much a part of the songlines as Christianity and, indeed, Islam, enigma has attached to Djalu as the turtle hatchling scuttles for the water. And, so, the challenge for filmmaker Strunin has been to look beyond the Balanda paradigm to tell the story of Djalu according to Djalu – a man he first met at Heathrow airport when the Yolngu master of the yirdaki (didgeredoo) was about to embark on a month-long European tour.

The foremost spiritual keeper of the yirdaki in Arnhem Land, Djalu is a living pillar of Yolngu civilisation. But his true gift to both the Yolngu and the worlds beyond has been as a cultural ambassador.

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An old facial wound, rumoured to be the result of a magical spell that an enemy conjured against him (but again, who knows for sure?) has left Djalu with a significant speech impediment that makes it difficult to understand what he says. But his tongue is the yirdaki, with its supposed powers of physical and spiritual healing, its echoes of peace.

Strunin’s crowd-funded movie has its beginnings in Djalu’s month-long 2009 European tour of sell-out houses in London, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Belgium and Italy, during which he and the old man shared hotel rooms and stories. Eventually Djalu and his family, based at Wallaby Beach near Yirrkala on the Gove Peninsula, adopted Strunin.

Djalu’s determination to reach out from the often insular Yolngu world was evidenced by the 2014 voyage to the island, Raragala, when he was also accompanied by members of his extended family, including sons Larry and Vernon, the visual artist Ghost Patrol (David Booth) and one of the world’s most renowned photographers of popular musicians, Denmark’s Søren Solkær.

Vernon, Djalu and Larry – who sings songs rooted in gospel and traditional belief with a beautiful, yearning falsetto that is hauntingly resonant of another Arnhem Land legend, Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu – are the bedrock of the band Barra-Westwind. Before the Raragala voyage, the somewhat reticent Larry began jamming in a studio with De Backer. Larry taught De Backer one of his songs, Balay Balay, which formed the basis of a set that Barra-Westwind, together with Gotye, played to packed and appreciative audiences at this year’s WOMADelaide world music festival.

Strunin said it was an important moment for Larry, Djalu’s eldest son, who had until then been reluctant to act as both an ambassador for Yolngu culture and the power of the yirdaki.

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There is concern in Djalu’s community about who might eventually fill his role as the keeper of the yirdaki.

Since WOMADelaide, Barra-Westwind have completed a tour of the top end of Australia (Gurrumul, from the Gumatj clan of Yunupingus along with Djalu’s wife, Dhopiya, hit the stage with them in Gove) and the band’s song Wiripu Mit’tji (Different Colour, One People) recently won the Indigenous Remote Communications Association’s best song award.

Djalu, meanwhile, recently won the National Indigenous Music Awards’ traditional music award of the year.

Strunin’s movie, Westwind, takes its name, like the Barra-Westwind band, from a story that Djalu tells about the sound leaving the yirdaki and going out to the island where he was born, Milingimbi Island in the Arafura Sea. There it forms a boulder. The sound returns to its source as the healing west wind.

The film, contemplating the life of Djalu as a Yolngu ambassador, a feared tribal law man, an elder, a devoted Christian and a musician, has been an enormous challenge for Strunin. He has remarked that every time he feels close to the truth about Djalu, “something else presents that adds to the enigma – and I feel compelled to follow it”.

Yolngu life – and death – is all about transit through past and present, through story, music and visual art.

Strunin’s forthcoming movie, it seems, might yet document an extraordinary cultural ambassadorship in similar transition.