SALLY GABORI: BENTINCK ISLAND, 2005-2007

Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori (c.1924–2015) was a senior Kaiadilt woman born and raised on Bentinck Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria. An accomplished weaver and singer of Kaiadilt songs, she lived on Bentinck Island until 1948, when the Kaiadilt community was relocated to nearby Mornington Island following drought and cyclonic flooding. Despite that displacement, Bentinck Island remained central to her cultural and familial life. Gabori began painting at Mornington Island Arts and Crafts Centre in 2005, when she was already in her eighties. Focusing tightly on works made between 2005 and 2007, this exhibition examines the extraordinary intensity of those first years. Across paintings connected to her own place, Mirdidingki; her husband's Dibirdibi Country; her brother King Alfred's Country; and her father's Country, Gabori moved rapidly between radically different ways of picturing Bentinck Island. Her full Kaiadilt name itself embodies this relationship to place: Mirdidingkingathi identifies her as a person born at Mirdidingki, while Juwarnda refers to her totem, the black dolphin. Coastlines, reefs, waterholes and family places recur, yet their painted forms continually change. Rather than presenting these works simply as tentative beginnings, the exhibition considers 2005–2007 as a concentrated period of invention, revealing how Gabori used the newly encountered medium of painting to give form to a lifetime of knowledge, memory and relationships across Bentinck Island.