Author: QAGOMA

Nyinyilki sits on the south-eastern coast of Bentinck Island and is home to a large permanent freshwater lagoon. Following the Kaiadilt Land Rights battles, an outstation was established there and is often referred to as ‘Main Base’ or ‘Main Camp’. Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori and the group of senior women whom she lived and worked with would return to Nyinyilki whenever possible during the dry season and to Mornington Island during the wet season due to a lack of infrastructure and resources. Many Kaiadilt know the settlement by the colloquial name ‘the old ladies’ camp’.

‘Nyinyilki or main base is where we built the outstation when we got our land back. That is why we call it main base as well’ Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori

A large shallow bay joins this stretch of coast to Barthayi (Fowler Island) in the south, and to the east a long rocky spit creates safe water where dugongs proliferate. The beach extends west to Mirdidingki, Sally’s birthplace, and Kabararrji, where her husband Kabararrjingathi Bulthuku Pat Gabori was born.

DELVE DEEPER: The life and art of Sally Gabori

Sally Gabori’s paintings of Nyinyilki are energised with memories of people and places from this area and have personal, familial, cultural and political importance. They often reference the rectangular freshwater lagoon fringed by jungle; the semi-circular rock-walled fish trap near the settlement; the cliffs to the west; sandbars that enable travel between Bentinck Island and Barthayi at low tide; and trails and tracks left by dugongs when feeding in the bay.

Acknowledgment of Country
The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Gallery stands in Brisbane. We pay respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders past and present and, in the spirit of reconciliation, acknowledge the immense creative contribution First Australians make to the art and culture of this country.

It is customary in many Indigenous communities not to mention the name or reproduce photographs of the deceased. All such mentions and photographs on the QAGOMA Blog are with permission, however, care and discretion should be exercised.

#QAGOMA

Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori’s depictions of her homeland are abstract in nature, but retain representational elements which map traditional country and cultural identity in monumental paintings.

Thundi (or Thunduyi) is her father’s Country, adjacent to a river near the island’s northern tip, which runs parallel to a ridge of tall sandhills that skirt its north-eastern coast. A large saltpan marks the wet season extent of the river, while its dry season form is flanked by mangroves. The river empties out onto a large sand and mud flat to the north, which reveal large sandbars at low tide.

This is the big river at Thundi on Bentinck Island. This is where my father was born. Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori

Many of Sally’s early paintings featured this river area, an important fishing place. Colourful flashes of paint indicate her favourite fish species, the bluefish. Later paintings of Thundi were generally much more austere in tone, often utilising only two colours to create fields of intense tonal and emotional intensity.

Her stark black-and-white painting, Thundi 2011 (illustrated), evokes the sandflats and sandbars off Thundi’s coast, pictured as if glistening in the light of a full moon. Sally overpainted other works in white, evoking sandflat ripple patterns, frothing water at the river’s mouth, small lapping waves, storms and cyclones approaching from the northern Gulf, or the complete inundation of the area during extreme weather.

Many of Sally’s Thundi paintings connect important sites along the north-eastern side of Bentinck Island, including Makarrki, her brother’s country at the head of the large river at the centre of the north shore, and Rukuthi, one of her family’s main living sites at Oak Tree Point at the island’s north-eastern tip.

My Father’s Country 2006 (illustrated) pictures Thundi, the country surrounding a river near the north-eastern tip of Bentinck Island, which was the country of Gabori’s father, Thunduyingathi Bijarrb. Gabori noted that the large circle was an important fishing area at the mouth of the river. When asked about the yellow marks she replied that they were her favourite fish, the snapper. She then found a paintbrush and added more yellow marks to indicate the abundance of these fish at Thundi and the importance of the area as a key fishing ground for Kaiadilt people.

Acknowledgment of Country
The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Gallery stands in Brisbane. We pay respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders past and present and, in the spirit of reconciliation, acknowledge the immense creative contribution First Australians make to the art and culture of this country.

It is customary in many Indigenous communities not to mention the name or reproduce photographs of the deceased. All such mentions and photographs on the QAGOMA Blog are with permission, however, care and discretion should be exercised.

#QAGOMA

In Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori’s paintings places and people are inseparable, stemming from the Kaiadilt tradition of naming people through association with the place and totem one was born into. By adding the Kaiadilt suffix ~ngathi (meaning ‘born at’) to a person’s birthplace, a name is created. Sally Gabori, born by the small creek at Mirdidingki, started life as Mirdidingkingathi.

This is where I was born on Bentinck Island next to the Mirdidingki River Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori

Gabori painted six key places hundreds of times each, every painting different from the one before, sometimes markedly. Yet in each there are landscape cues to be found.

DELVE DEEPER: The life and art of Sally Gabori

Gabori’s ‘My Country’ paintings celebrate her birthplace, Mirdidingki, centred on a small creek that runs from inland Bentinck Island to a small bay on the southern coast, facing towards the massive rivers of the mainland Gulf coast. Sally was born here around 1924.

Mirdidingki Creek is tidal, connected to the ocean at high tide and separated by long sand flats at low tide. Inland, saltpans emerge, while at the creek’s edges mangroves create a heavily forested tidal estuary towards its mouth. Halfway along the creek, a small but striking island devoid of vegetation emerges from the mangroves – a piercing circle of white among the green trees. Nearer the creek’s mouth, a branch extends to the east along the back-beaches of the bay. The creek ends in a long sandy tidal flat that extends into the bay for hundreds of metres, then transforms into a vibrant network of connecting coral reefs teeming with turtles, fish and other sea life.

Sally’s paintings of Mirdidingki often include strong linear icons at their centre, referencing the creek there, while others depict either the tree she was born under, the places loved ones are buried, the sand flats where shell fish are collected, or the camp site and middens where shells amassed over millennia.

Acknowledgment of Country
The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Gallery stands in Brisbane. We pay respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders past and present and, in the spirit of reconciliation, acknowledge the immense creative contribution First Australians make to the art and culture of this country.

It is customary in many Indigenous communities not to mention the name or reproduce photographs of the deceased. All such mentions and photographs on the QAGOMA Blog are with permission, however, care and discretion should be exercised.

#QAGOMA

Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori was born around 1924 near a small creek on the southern side of Bentinck Island, in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria. This small island, measuring around 16 by 18 kilometres, is the Dulka Warngiid, the land of all, of the Kaiadilt people.

‘Danda ngijinda dulk, danda ngijinda malaa, danda ngad’
(This is my Land, this is my Sea, this is who I am)
Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori

Sally Gabori lived an entirely traditional life for her first 23 years, moving between her family’s main homeland sites and living according to an unbroken ancestral culture. In 1948, following devastating drought, storms and a near four-metre tidal surge, she and her kin were moved to the Presbyterian Mission on nearby Mornington Island. She remained there in enforced exile until the 1980s when the Land Rights movement saw small outstations erected on Bentinck. Remoteness and lack of infrastructure meant, however, that Gabori would spend most of her life away from her country. Yet she always kept it in her heart, singing its songs with family and maintaining Kaiadilt culture.

DELVE DEEPER: The life and art of Sally Gabori

In 2005 Gabori was introduced to painting, and her unique style, vision and story captured the imagination of the art world. Mixing wet paints on canvas to create tonal shifts, she evoked geological or ecological flux on Bentinck, such as the transition from land to sea, while hard-edged colour contrasts describe structures that for thousands of years have remained unchanged, such as the ancient rock-walled fish traps, or the cliffs bordering the ocean. Gabori’s paintings resonate with the colours and textures of Kaiadilt country and the intensity and complexities of her history and memories.

Sally Gabori ‘My Country’

My Country 2005 was created at a workshop in 2005 at the Mornington Island Arts and Crafts Centre and was the first ever produced by the artist. During the dry season, many of Gabori’s family returned to Bentinck Island but she remained on Mornington Island with her husband. She was persuaded to attend a painting workshop led by curator Simon Turner from Woolloongabba Art Gallery. This first work was praised by senior Lardil artist Melville Escott. Gabori soon developed a love of painting and returned to the art centre whenever possible. Upon her family’s return, Gabori showed them her paintings and they rallied around her, creating a small but incredibly vibrant Kaiadilt art movement.

Early paintings

In 2005 on Mornington Island, home to the Lardil people, at about 81 years of age, Gabori first picked up a paintbrush and began to memorialise her homeland. Although the Lardil people have a strong and proud art history, the Kaiadilt community had little exposure to art, or any comparable form of mark-making, prior to 2005. Traditional tools, objects, or bodies were scarcely painted, as was the tradition elsewhere in Aboriginal Australia. The sole occasion of Kaiadilt people ever recording their stories through art-like media was in a group of drawings made at the request of ethnologist Norman B Tindale during his expedition to Bentinck Island in 1960, today housed in the South Australian Museum.

At community painting workshops Gabori — previously known as a weaver of traditional bags, baskets and nets — became the first Kaiadilt person to engage with art and her love of paint and painting quickly grew. Her first painting, My Country 2005 featured significant sites and memories from her birthplace around Mirdidingki Creek, on the south side of Bentinck Island. A further six of Gabori’s earliest works show her focus on the places of her family: Thundi, her father’s country, Makarrki, her brother’s Country, and Dibirdibi Country, associated with her husband.

Within months Gabori had developed both in confidence and technique and was producing four-and-a-half metre paintings crowded with hundreds of concentric circles, conjuring frenzied schools of fish feeding at her favourite fishing places on Bentinck. Paintings from late 2005 through to 2007 show the rapid development of an expressive gestural style which would become her trademark through the later years of her career and life.

Sally Gabori ‘All the fish’

 All the fish 2005 is one of around six large-scale works produced within the first year of Gabori’s career. These works conjure a large school of fish erupting from the bountiful reef-laden waters around Bentinck Island to feed on smaller fish or other marine creatures at the surface. As each fish breaks the water’s surface a wave radiates from the disruption and, for a few seconds, a circle, or hundreds of them, remain as the memory of the interaction between beings and place. These paintings allude to schools of mullet, queen fish, mackerel or tuna, but never figuratively depict them. Instead, Gabori focused on the impact they and their activities had on the land.

Acknowledgment of Country
The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Gallery stands in Brisbane. We pay respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders past and present and, in the spirit of reconciliation, acknowledge the immense creative contribution First Australians make to the art and culture of this country.

It is customary in many Indigenous communities not to mention the name or reproduce photographs of the deceased. All such mentions and photographs on the QAGOMA Blog are with permission, however, care and discretion should be exercised.

#QAGOMA