"Dingkarri is a small island reef south of Sweers Island. This island reef is
the southern boundary of our country. It is a good place to hunt turtle and
dugong." Sally Gabori
In this painting, Sally Gabori depicts Dingkarri, 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 an abundance of fertile ground for hunting turtles
and dugongs, both key sources of food and ceremonial connection for the
Kaiadilt people.
Rather than mapping the reef in literal terms, Gabori translates its presence into fields of shifting colour and movement. Broad planes of yellow, reds, and blues divide across the canvas, echoing the tidal flows
and sandbanks that define the shallow island waters. The work reflects
her instinctive approach to abstraction, where memory, place, and
emotion are conveyed through chromatic intensity and gestural mark-
making rather than figurative form.
Painted with confident, sweeping strokes, Dingkarri captures the rhythms
of sea and sky that define Kaiadilt Country. It is both a declaration of
identity and an act of remembrance, a visual mapping of home created
decades after the artist and her community were displaced from Bentinck
Island to nearby Mornington Island. The canvas becomes a vessel for
reconnection: a vivid, sensorial reimagin