Dibirdibi Country 2008

Sally Gabori is one of a handful of leading artists from Indigenous communities who work outside established local traditions in an exceptional idiosyncratic style. Her paintings are widely acclaimed and admired for their vitality, immediacy and intuitive use of colour. Born into the Kaiadilt people of Bentinck Island, the largest of the South Wellesley group of islands in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria, she lived an almost exclusively traditional life until her early twenties, gathering bush foods and fishing with the aid of the complex stone-walled fish traps. In 1948, following the effects of drought, high tide and the resultant salination of underground freshwater stores, all Bentinck people were moved to the Methodist Mission on the larger Mornington Island. Gabori has, however, maintained a strong connection to Kaiadilt country through language, story and returning to the island.

Dibirdibi Country 2008 conveys the story places of Dibirdibi, the rock cod ancestor, and charts his creative journey along the Bentinck Island coastline. These stories belonged to her late husband, Pat, whose traditional name was also Dibirdibi. This and other more recent paintings by Gabori are increasingly abstract in nature, but retain certain representational elements crucial to mapping her country, including the prominent fish traps, which here dominate the painting in the form of bold, mainly black-and-white, forms.