“It really came out of nowhere.”īefore then, Gabori was known foremost as a shy grandmother with a talent for weaving. “Absolutely everyone was surprised when, all of a sudden in 2005, she took off,” says Nicholas Evans, a linguist at the Australian National University with a long connection to Gabori and Mornington Island (and no relation to Brett Evans). Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori was around 80 years old when she first picked up a paint brush. The debate about whether the Gabori paintings that Evans unlawfully sold should continue to be traded and hung goes to the heart of some of the key tensions in the commercial art world: who has the right to say whether a genuine work should be traded, and by whom what happens when the gatekeepers don’t all agree, or don’t agree with the family and who has the right to say that a work of art that nobody says is fake should or should not exist in the public sphere?įrom left, Sally Gabori’s great-granddaughter Tori Juwarnda Wilson-Gabori, daughter Amanda Gabori Dibirdibi and great-granddaughter Narelle Gabori at the Fondation Cartier exhibition in Paris. It centres on ethically produced art dishonestly sold, a celebrated artist denied her due, and what happens to the market for her work as a result. It doesn’t involve fakes, or the grubby deals of so-called carpetbaggers who exploit Indigenous artists by getting them to paint in sweat-shops and under other unsavoury conditions. This is not the first time the art trade has been racked by scandal and it won’t be the last. Some of the paintings he improperly sold ended up in the private collections of the rich and famous, bought in good faith by people with no knowledge of his crimes but now caught up in its aftermath. Sue Lee went too, to help smooth the bumps of international travel.Įvans is in jail in Brisbane, but his crime continues to reverberate. Credit: David Foote/AUSPICĪmanda travelled to Paris for the launch, her first time out of Australia, along with two of Sally Gabori’s great-granddaughters, Narelle and Tori. PM Anthony Albanese at the opening of the Gabori exhibition in Paris earlier this month. It’s a big year for the Gaboris – not only has their mother been named a Queensland Great, she is starring in her first major international exhibition, in Paris at the prestigious Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, which was opened by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on July 1. I meet Amanda, 56, and Dorothy, 64, at their Brisbane hotel with their helper, the gentle Sue Lee, who’s known the family for more than a decade and was with them by Gabori’s side when the artist died in 2015, aged 91. Amanda adds, deadpan: “It goes on and on and on, too many too count.” “There’s more coming,” Dorothy, says with a grin as she finishes her eggs on toast. Sally Gabori has been named one of this year’s Queensland Greats, and her daughters are here in Brisbane in early June to represent their large extended family, which includes five surviving children (of 11) and so many grandchildren and great-grandchildren that the sisters have stopped counting. They’ve made the taxing 1800-kilometre journey by plane from their homes on Mornington Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria all the way to Brisbane, facing delays, a cancelled flight and an unscheduled night in Cairns.Īt last they’re here, to receive an honour on behalf of their late mother, Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori, whose tale of painting prolifically through her 80s, and finding national and international acclaim in the process, is one of the most remarkable Australia has seen. It’s been an exhausting couple of days for Dorothy and Amanda Gabori.
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