A gentle activist and a spiritual innovator, Guboo believed that everyone, black and white, could share the Dreaming once they truly respected the land and began to open their hearts to her mysterious teachings.

His mission was to make Aboriginal spirituality relevant to the 21st century.

It was a message that many in black Australia were not ready to hear.

Guboo was born under a gum tree at Braidwood in 1909 to Yuin elder Bill Thomas and his part-Chinese wife, Linno Ahoy.

The pair met on the goldfields and later settled at Wallaga Lake where Guboo spent his earliest years.

Despite the policy at the time of wrenching children from their families, Guboo's mother managed to outwit the authorities so Guboo grew up among his tribe.

His parents took him out of the tiny local school when he was eight to educate him in "Dreaming culture".

Although he was the third of 10 children he was recognised as a spiritual leader by the elders of the Yuin before he was 10.

His father's mother, Granny Tungii, was a medicine woman who took him along on her healing rounds.

His father, grandfather and uncles instructed him in sacred rites, male ancestral laws and Yuin customs so that he could be properly initiated.

He was eventually chosen by them to be given special knowledge to become the future elder and spiritual leader of the Yuin nation.

Guboo always maintained that the Yuin was a nation made up of many individual tribes.

When he was nine, his father, uncle and other Yuin elders took him on their Dreamtime walkabout from Malacoota to the Hawkesbury River and showed him all the sacred sites for which he would later be responsible.

Seven decades later, when he was 80, he re-enacted the 350 km walk with a group of Koori kids from broken homes and a 50-strong support group.

It took six weeks and was a personal Bicentennial gesture.

It is still recalled with awe by its participants.

While hwe was a teenager during the 1920s Guboo toured with a Hawaiian performing troupe and later a gumleaf dance band.

He used these trips to visit every Aboriginal mission from Eden, up the coast as far as Beaudesert in Queensland and inland over the mountains.

On all these trips he would visit the old people to learn more about their customs and beliefs, tour their sacred sites and talk to them about protecting the land and the Great Spirit that sustained it.

He was always a hard-working man providing for a large extended family.

He never drank or smoked.

After jackarooing through the Depression, collecting shellac and cutting railway sleepers, he worked in a foundry where he became shop steward.

Most of his working life, however, was spent as a commercial fisherman on the coast.

It was these working experiences that made him a firm Labor man and trade union supporter.

He was much loved by those in the union movement, especially in Wollongong and the South Coast.

He regularly attended union marches and on May Days for many years took up a position at the head of the parade as befitted his status.

Guboo sold his boat after 25 years to devote himself to his Yuin responsibilities.

He began by hitchhiking to Canberra to urge the Government to make Wallaga Lake mission a reserve and to seek protection of the sacred sites.

Before long he began working with the Institute of Aboriginal studies, recording all the Aboriginal sites in coastal NSW.

He made many friends who joined him on his field camps and supported his struggle.

He would take people up on to the sacred mountains and explain how powerful they are.

These trips sowed the seeds of reconciliation in the hearts of many politicians, conservationists and activists.

His work with the Institute of Aboriginal Studies was groundbreaking and became the basis of all future land claims along the south coast.

Outside his friends and acquaintances almost nothing was heard publicly of Guboo until 1979 when finally, largely through his efforts, the then Premier Neville Wran ordered logging to cease on Mumbulla Mountain.

This opened the way for the first land rights settlement for Aborigines in NSW.

More and more around that time he began espousing a spiritual message, believing that noisy protests and marches only aggravated racism.

He wanted to build bridges, bringing people together through mutual love and respect for Mother Earth.

He wanted the Dreaming to enrich the lives of all Australians and devoted the rest of his life to being a catalyst for a worldwide return to selfless ancient values.

He went to the United Nations to urge the World Council of Churches to accept indigenous religions and became a member of the Bahai faith.

Over the years many people were drawn to him and regarded him as a guru but he rejected the tag.

"I'm just plain Guboo, and Guboo means your 'good friend' so I'm just your good friend," he would say.

"Whoever moulded you moulded me. We are all one, brother."

His teachings took him around the world many times with not a penny in his pocket and made him friends among many cultures.

He met spiritual and religious leaders who would later contact him when passing through Australia, as the Dalai Lama did recently.

His life was not without controversy.

During the fight to save sites from woodchipping he took a group of supporters, conservationists and politicians up Gulaga.

After sleeping on the side of his sacred mountain, the group woke in the early morning astonished to see him in the distance, stripped naked and painted in traditional ochres.

He poured a handful of soil on to the ground and rammed the tip of his spear into the earth.

He then declared to all his supporters on Gulaga: "Starting with the Yuin tribal territory you are charged with ‘renewing the Dreaming' in Australia, mountain by mountain.

"When the renewing is complete here, its strength will awaken other tribes in other areas to take their heritage and renew the Dreaming in their own traditional areas."

It was the first time an Aboriginal elder had proclaimed he would consider anyone who pledged him or herself to work towards the preservation of the forests, and the rewal and protection of the sacred sites, to be part of his own tribe.

Apart from those in his immediate family, it was a message that fell flat among his own people.

While Guboo went on to work tirelessly to bring black and white together in love and unity, his own people mistrusted him for most of his remaining life.

For the next 20 years he held Dreaming camps around Australia and overseas to teach and pass on his knowledge, to renew the Dreaming of these places and restore sacredness to the landscape.

Guboo is survived by Anne and Jessie, seven of his 12 children, 35 grandchildren, 60 great-grandchildren and seven great-great-grandchildren, a brother Cecil and a sister Eileen.

He returned to Mother Earth in the presence of a huge gathering at Wallaga Lake under the shadow of Gulaga, the sacred mountain which he won from the woodchippers and safeguarded on behalf of his own people and all humanity.