Paddy Compass Namatbara

Paddy Compass Namatbara spent his days on a red-dirt outstation near Maningrida, where he’d hum old songs while scraping ochre onto stringybark. The late bark paintings he made for ceremonies, full of lightning snakes and ancestral zigzags, still hum with that same voice. Tap any of them, like Bark Painting on the app, and you’ll see how a single piece can carry a whole songline across the decades.