Depends who's asking and what he's had to drink.
DaN has claimed on various occasions to be Anmatyerre, Alyawarre, "a bit of everything," and once, memorably, "none of your bloody business." The old people up that way either won't talk about him or can't stop talking about him. Nobody has been able to confirm which mob he belongs to and DaN changes the answer like he changes his boots. Rarely and without explanation. What everybody agrees on is that the Ancestors were fighting over something that night. One wanted to keep him on rock and ochre, the other wanted to fling him screaming into some glowing future nobody had dreamt yet. DaN says he listened to both of them and just laughed.
Now at the legendary age of 78, or 72 when a beautiful woman is listening and the light is kind, DaN hUby is whispered about across desert camps, art centres, tin-shed galleries, beachside pubs and places with no name, as the man who walks between worlds like its nothing. Barefoot in the sand one minute. Barefoot in the pixels the next.
From a young fella he was never quite in one place. At six he painted a termite mound with ochre, crushed wildflowers and pure emotional thunder. By nine the old people had already gently warned each other: "that boy paints too strong. He makes the Country dream louder than it should."
By the 1970s and 80s he was a roaming desert phantom. Painting on bark, canvas, rusted car doors, the sides of road-trains moving at speed, and once, according to witnesses who still go quiet when you ask, the flank of a low-flying weather plane that came in too close over his camp. His style became known as "Punctionan." A wild lawless marriage of traditional dot and line work with explosive colour, raw energy and pure unfiltered madness that makes old people and young people alike shake their heads and say nothing useful.
When he walked back out he was wearing one boot, a battered Akubra with feathers and fairy lights woven through the band, and carrying 43 canvases painted with what he called "messages from the moon, the old people, and some dodgy signal from the future."
He has walked Neville across Country as a companion and spiritual advisor. He has painted live while roped to a desert oak in a cyclone "for proper stability." He once sold a monumental work to a minor European prince in exchange for a Harley-Davidson and a case of absinthe. He refused a major international show because "the lighting was too cowardly and the tea was rubbish."
He claims he taught colour theory and rhythm to a mob of escaped circus brumbies. He summers in far northern waters where the midnight sun gives him twenty-three hours of painting light and one hour to argue with moose. He still swears Neville can find water, opals, sacred places, bad energy, and people who lie about understanding art.
A man who once threatened to throw a laptop into a billabong for making noise during quiet time has become a wild pioneer of something nobody has a proper name for yet.
His works now live across both worlds. Massive physical canvases covered in pulsating dots and lines that seem to breathe when you stare too long. And vast roaring pieces on screen where ancestral patterns swirl and shatter and reform with the thump of a bass drum. Particles dance alongside old mark-making. Eyes float and watch you from both the desert sky and whatever screen you happen to be holding. The same painting can exist as wet ochre drying in the sun at his camp and as infinite pulsing light in fourteen countries at once.
He built his visualiser using stubbornness and what he calls "spiritual debugging while singing." He refuses any tool he cannot personally yell at. He has turned down three separate offers to sell his work as something called an NFT because "I dont sell things that dont exist to people who dont understand Country. Real or otherwise."
His camp is a glorious multidimensional mess. Ochre pots next to busted screens. Feathers tangled in cables. Half-finished masterpieces leaning against things that hum. One throne made from mulga wood, fencing wire and surfboard offcuts. Visitors say the billy tea is strong enough to wake the dead and everyone who came before them. The yarns are magnificent. Nothing in either world is where it should be.
The birth paper was lost long ago. Washed away possibly. Eaten by Neville possibly. Never written down properly because some stories arent meant for paper.
His heritage shifts the same way. Ask him on a Monday and hes first people, born on Country, connected to everything. Ask him on a Thursday after a bad week and he'll tell you to get stuffed and that it doesnt matter and why are you asking and who sent you. Ask him with a drink in his hand and he'll tell you three different stories before sunset and all of them will feel true.
Nobody has pinned him down. Nobody will. Thats the point.