The Lubly Dae Crew & visibility beyond NAIDOC Week

NAIDOC Week is an Australian observance held each July, representing the National Aboriginal and Islanders Day Observance Committee. With roots in the 1928 Day of Mourning, it became a week-long event in 1975 and is a yearly reminder of, among other things, acknowledging and platforming the voices of First Nations Australian and Islander peoples across every walk of life.

Now in its fourth year of operation, the Boorloo/Perth-based collective Lubly Dae Crew coordinates events across NAIDOC Week on a yearly basis. In 2022, the collaborative project between duo 2LUBLY and Yikes began with a series of DJ workshops for Mob and an annual NAIDOC Week party known as Lubly Dae.

Since its inception, it has become a staple in Boorloo's NAIDOC Week calendar, responsible for creating safe spaces, opportunities, and a sense of community among its members.

Outside of Lubly Dae, 2LUBLY and Yikes have in recent years become an increasingly active force in Australia’s national dance scene. Just earlier this year, Yikes released ‘Come Round’, a much-loved collaborative EP with Naarm/Melbourne artist DJ PGZ, and 2LUBLY have in recent months been featured on lineups for Pitch Music & Arts, supported Mount Kimbie, and appeared on Triple J’s mix-up series, among other notable achievements.

With their annual NAIDOC Week events kicking off this weekend, with a gig on Sunday, July 6, we sat down with the trio to understand what these yearly events mean for them and the national scene.

SARAH: The Lubly Dae event started as a showcase of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander DJs from Yikes’s and Sepsi's first DJ Workshop series and evolved into our annual NAIDOC dance party accessible to mob and allies alike.

The DJ workshops is what started the momentum and continues today with us introducing

DJing as a form of musical expression to as much Mob as possible. Lubly Dae is really a

culmination of our grassroots Aboriginal DJ collective here in Boorloo and a way for us to come together every year to prioritise Blak joy through music.

LULK: NAIDOC week is such an important time to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community and it all started with a protest. Evolving from the Day of Mourning March in Sydney on January 26, 1938 organised by civil rights groups the Australian Aborigines League and Aborigines Progressive Association (Note that Aborigines is not the term we use and accept today. Aboriginal is) It’s an incredible legacy sparked by the strength and resistance of those that came before us and we wanted to contribute to the celebrations here in Boorloo/Perth WA.

Lubly Dae stands to provide a fun, intimate and inexpensive way for Mob in our community to let their hair down, celebrate our continued culture and each other. Lubly Dae has also served as an opportunity to put on all Blak lineups and showcase local talent in a safe and supportive environment. Over the last four years, a beautiful community has grown around the event, and we pride ourselves on creating spaces that bring people together.

KEV: My gateway to RTRFM was through an invitation by Rok Riley. She asked me to join her show one week, a few years bac,k after I had released my first track on the local label Midnight Elevator. Riley is a pillar of our community here and has always made space for new people coming through - she embodies the spirit of community radio through her actions, and it opened my eyes to the impact spaces like this can have on emerging artists. I think you’ll find that with most people who are a part of any community radio station. There is a collective stewardship of the volunteers, presenters and staff in the station to grow and celebrate our local community.

Personally, community radio gave me the confidence to continue my journey into DJing and

develop myself as an artist. Coming into hosting my third year of Friday Full Frequency, I’ve had the opportunity to connect with international, interstate and local artists that I honestly wouldn’t say would have happened if not for community radio.

As a crew, we’ve all been lucky to contribute to community radio and get our sounds out there. Last year, we did a radio residency on RTR.2 and showcased a bunch of DJs from the

workshops. It’s a great way to connect with listeners, gain experience and explore your sound without the pressure of an audience in front of you.

SARAH: You can’t be what you can’t see. We’ve all grown up with First Nations artists and music makers in our communities who continue to inspire our work today. We each draw on those early musical influences as artists and promoters to help build our vision and create meaningful experiences for our community. That's part of why Lubly Dae exists.

Showcasing local talent is also a big part of Lubly Dae and it's so important because then Mob in our community get to see Blackfulla DJs and think that they can do what we do too.

LULK: If you don’t think that politics belong on the dancefloor, then I invite you to dig deeper. What sentiment do you think first sparked the raves you’ve come to love and know today? Community events, Black events and Queer events serve to hold space for underrepresented and/or oppressed communities. It all starts somewhere, and that’s often by someone who noticed a need for community to come together and decided to do something about it.

DJs, music producers, we are all artists, and I’ve always believed that at the core of the artist is a desire for freedom. It’s bypassing the rules of capitalism and an everyday 9-5 to dedicate your time to creative expression, and the most impactful artistic works are rooted in lived experience and truth-telling for the sake of our collective freedom.

KEV: The workshops started from the idea of finding ways to give back and share my skills and experiences with local mob. We have to thank Sepsi, who at the time was working at the Art Gallery of WA and suggested we run the first year there. They had the equipment and space for us to make the idea a reality. Especially as we had no money, just the idea. We structure the workshops to run over a few weeks, learning together and pushing ourselves over that time. There’s a strong focus on ensuring these aren't just a one-off, tick-a-box session, but approach it with the focus to build our community of blakfulla DJs and artists. When you create the space and actually invest in underrepresented artists, you see the lineup start to reflect that.

The experience for us, and what keeps us going, is seeing the local mob smash it. There’s a lot of us here now. And the workshops are growing each year, as well as the support from partners and the community as a whole.

LULK: Free entry for First Nations folks is a simple way to make your event more accessible to Mob. At the heart of it is acknowledging that wherever you are in ‘Australia’, you are on stolen land and (in one way or another) benefit from the dispossession of country from the Aboriginal custodians of the land you are on. It’s also a way to get more First Nations folks to your event, although free tickets for Mob is just one small part of cultivating a culturally diverse and welcoming environment at your event, which is something all promoters should be striving for.

KEV: We want to create a safe place to learn together, in the way we wanted, because we knew how powerful that would be, which is often a hard sell. We did have a hard time in the beginning to prove this to larger organisations without having the Western ways of measuring success with specific outcomes.

As the workshops have grown over the years, so has the support from bigger organisations who can see the impacts of our workshops. This support hasn’t been linear, and it varies each year, but we’ve been able to connect organisations that believe in what we’re doing with no question, other than ‘what do you need?’.

Purple’s Queer Futures Fund, Ableton and Electronic Music Australia (EMC) have been amazing examples of this. We’re grateful for their support, but it also opens up the workshop mob to connect with these national and international organisations. We’re often forgotten about over here in Boorloo. Geographically, it’s difficult as an artist to see the career pathway and these partnerships show this doesn’t have to be a barrier.

SARAH: Every year NAIDOC week is such a highlight for Mob, sometimes we call it ‘Blak Christmas’, which I think sums it up pretty well. Lubly Dae and the chance to celebrate with Mob is a culmination of Blak joy and something we really look forward to every year as we kick NAIDOC week off. We also have some live dance performers this year, who are extremely talented artists and will be incredible to witness.

LULK: Creatives express themselves through so many different forms, and Lubly Dae is all about showcasing that. We’ve got talented friends contributing to all sides of the event. From the poster artwork, to the decks, stage and dance floor. Community is really the centre of Lubly Dae and the energy of every artist, performer, dancer and those that show up to celebrate with us is what makes it so special.

KEV: Mob across the continent have been breaking new ground. We’re seeing more First Nations artists now (specifically within dance music), more mob producing and performing on bigger stages. There have been amazing examples recently of thoughtful curation over tokenistic bookings, which I’m very excited to see more of from our industry.

SARAH: I really think the possibilities for mob in dance music culture are endless, and I’m excited to see us represented sonically across more stages, events and dancefloors. We’re seeing a rise in Mob taking control of spaces and showcasing their talent, which has been really inspiring to witness how we can do that as a community in so many different ways.

LULK: I’m always deeply inspired by Queer and First Nations artists in this country and now that DJing and music production is becoming more accessible to our communities I feel I have more music I resonate with and can express myself through. I’m excited to hear new sounds inspired by culture and lived experiences, and how that translates through my sets as a DJ.

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Lubly Dae’s NAIDOC Week dance party featuring Agapantha, FHOLT, House of Bok, Justice of the Beats, Robin Banks, Yikes b2b 2LUBLY, Woods and performances by Conway and Nathan Dewar is this Sunday, July 6.

Tickets are $15 on the door with free entry for Mob.

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Jack Colquhoun is Mixmag ANZ's Managing Editor, find him on Instagram.