My Father's Country - Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori

In this painting, Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori depicts a small island reef that marks the southern boundary of her ancestral Country on Bentinck Island in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria. The site holds both geographic and cultural significance, with fertile hunting grounds for turtles and dugongs, important sources of food and central to the cultural life of the Kayardild people.

Rather than describing the reef in literal terms, Sally Gabori translates its presence into fields of shifting colour and movement. Broad passages of white, red and blue move across the canvas, evoking the tidal currents, sandbanks and shallow waters that characterise this part of the island. The work exemplifies her instinctive approach to abstraction, where memory, place and lived experience are expressed through colour and gesture rather than representational form.

Painted with confident, sweeping brushstrokes, the work captures the rhythms of sea and sky that define Kayardild Country. It is both an affirmation of identity and an act of remembrance, created decades after Sally Gabori and the Kayardild community were forcibly relocated from Bentinck Island to nearby Mornington Island.