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Bluey Now Speaks an Indigenous Australian Language – and Its Producer Says That's Just the Start
Five episodes ofBluey, the Australian animated series about a family of blue heeler dogs, are now available in a language that has never before carried a mainstream children's show: Yolŋu Matha, spoken across communities in Northeast Arnhem Land, in Australia's far north.
The episodes — "The Beach," "The Creek," "Sleepytime," "Grandad" and "Rug Island," all from the show's first two seasons — launched on ABC iview on July 5 as part of the broadcaster's programming for NAIDOC Week, Australia's annual observance honoring the history, culture and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The episodes will screen again in August at the Garma Festival, the country's largest Indigenous cultural gathering.
Blueyis currently available in more than 140 countries and over 20 language translations, and was the most-streamed title in the U.S. for a second consecutive year in 2025, logging more than 45 billion minutes watched on Disney+. None of that international machinery produced this version. It was built separately, by Yolŋu Radio and the Aboriginal Resource and Development Services (ARDS), working with the ABC and Ludo Studio, the Brisbane-based company that makes the show.
The voice cast is drawn from the community the language belongs to. Dimathaya Burrawanga, a founding member of the Yolŋu surf rock band King Stingray, voices Bandit. Rosie Mununggurr voices Chilli. Andrew Gurruwiwi, a Yolŋu elder, voices Grandad.
What separates this from a standard foreign-language dub is how it was made. According to the production team, Yolŋu Matha has no direct equivalent for some of the English concepts in the original scripts. Rather than translate those moments literally, the team rebuilt them around Yolŋu concepts and storytelling instead — closer to a retelling than a subtitle job.
It would be easy to read the NAIDOC Week timing as a nice one-off gesture and move on. It isn't.Blueyproducer Sam Moor has said the idea "came about right from early days," not long after the show launched in 2018, and that the creative team "were on board right from the start." Getting it made took years. "It was a long road," Moor said. "It took us a long time to get it to come to fruition, but [the network] ABC were really big supporters of making it happen."
That is a different kind of commitment than most global children's franchises make. The usual playbook for a hit kids' show is to chase the languages that unlock the most viewers: Spanish, Mandarin, French, whatever grows the subscriber base fastest.Bluey, which also remains the top preschool toy brand in the U.S., already exists in dozens of languages for exactly that reason. Yolŋu Matha unlocks no comparable audience — Northeast Arnhem Land's Yolŋu-speaking communities number in the low thousands. The show did it anyway, and Moor has said the team is now talking with "several more groups" about doing it again, starting with Brisbane. "We're very keen to do Brisbane, because that's where the show is made," she said.
Moor has been careful not to frame any of this asBlueymaking a statement. "Bluey's never been a show about something," she said. "There's never tried to be a message inBluey. It's not that kind of show. It's meant to be — and it is — very relatable." Asked about the decision to keep pursuing projects like this one, she put it more simply: "It's just about serving the audience — it's about making every child seen and heard."
She has also described watching a video of Indigenous children's reactions to the newly dubbed episodes as one of the more affecting parts of the project. "I had tears pricking my eyes when I saw that," Moor said. "It is just this group of kids that feel like they've been seen."
None of this changes what most families watch when they turn onBluey. The English-language original of "The Beach" — one of the five episodes now also told in Yolŋu Matha — is one of several full Bluey episodes free to watch on YouTube. But the Yolŋu Matha episodes are a reminder of something easy to lose sight of with a show this big: somewhere behind the streaming numbers and the toy-aisle dominance, someone is still deciding that a story belongs to a few thousand people just as much as it belongs to a few hundred million.
The episodes — "The Beach," "The Creek," "Sleepytime," "Grandad" and "Rug Island," all from the show's first two seasons — launched on ABC iview on July 5 as part of the broadcaster's programming for NAIDOC Week, Australia's annual observance honoring the history, culture and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The episodes will screen again in August at the Garma Festival, the country's largest Indigenous cultural gathering.
Blueyis currently available in more than 140 countries and over 20 language translations, and was the most-streamed title in the U.S. for a second consecutive year in 2025, logging more than 45 billion minutes watched on Disney+. None of that international machinery produced this version. It was built separately, by Yolŋu Radio and the Aboriginal Resource and Development Services (ARDS), working with the ABC and Ludo Studio, the Brisbane-based company that makes the show.
The voice cast is drawn from the community the language belongs to. Dimathaya Burrawanga, a founding member of the Yolŋu surf rock band King Stingray, voices Bandit. Rosie Mununggurr voices Chilli. Andrew Gurruwiwi, a Yolŋu elder, voices Grandad.
What separates this from a standard foreign-language dub is how it was made. According to the production team, Yolŋu Matha has no direct equivalent for some of the English concepts in the original scripts. Rather than translate those moments literally, the team rebuilt them around Yolŋu concepts and storytelling instead — closer to a retelling than a subtitle job.
It would be easy to read the NAIDOC Week timing as a nice one-off gesture and move on. It isn't.Blueyproducer Sam Moor has said the idea "came about right from early days," not long after the show launched in 2018, and that the creative team "were on board right from the start." Getting it made took years. "It was a long road," Moor said. "It took us a long time to get it to come to fruition, but [the network] ABC were really big supporters of making it happen."
That is a different kind of commitment than most global children's franchises make. The usual playbook for a hit kids' show is to chase the languages that unlock the most viewers: Spanish, Mandarin, French, whatever grows the subscriber base fastest.Bluey, which also remains the top preschool toy brand in the U.S., already exists in dozens of languages for exactly that reason. Yolŋu Matha unlocks no comparable audience — Northeast Arnhem Land's Yolŋu-speaking communities number in the low thousands. The show did it anyway, and Moor has said the team is now talking with "several more groups" about doing it again, starting with Brisbane. "We're very keen to do Brisbane, because that's where the show is made," she said.
Moor has been careful not to frame any of this asBlueymaking a statement. "Bluey's never been a show about something," she said. "There's never tried to be a message inBluey. It's not that kind of show. It's meant to be — and it is — very relatable." Asked about the decision to keep pursuing projects like this one, she put it more simply: "It's just about serving the audience — it's about making every child seen and heard."
She has also described watching a video of Indigenous children's reactions to the newly dubbed episodes as one of the more affecting parts of the project. "I had tears pricking my eyes when I saw that," Moor said. "It is just this group of kids that feel like they've been seen."
None of this changes what most families watch when they turn onBluey. The English-language original of "The Beach" — one of the five episodes now also told in Yolŋu Matha — is one of several full Bluey episodes free to watch on YouTube. But the Yolŋu Matha episodes are a reminder of something easy to lose sight of with a show this big: somewhere behind the streaming numbers and the toy-aisle dominance, someone is still deciding that a story belongs to a few thousand people just as much as it belongs to a few hundred million.