Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori

An anthropologist and linguist, Nicholas Evans has carried out fieldwork on several Indigenous languages of northern Australia and Papua New Guinea, including Bininj Gun-wok, Dalabon, Nen and Kayardilt, which he speaks fluently. His first linguistic fieldwork was with the Kaiadilt people of Bentinck Island; he was adopted as the son of their tribal leader Darwin Moodoonuthi and his wife May in 1982, creating bonds that have endured ever since.

Bruce Johnson McLean is a member of the Wierdi aboriginal community of the Birri Gubba Nation in the state of Queensland, north-eastern Australia. Since 2020, Bruce Johnson McLean has held the post of Barbara Jean Humphreys Assistant Director, First Nations Engagement at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. He was formerly Curator of Indigenous Australian Art at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, where he curated in 2016 the first major retrospective on the work of Sally Gabori, Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori: Dulka Warngiid – Land of All.

Judith Ryan is an Australian art historian, specialized in Indigenous Art from the 20th and 21st century. She received a BA Honours in Fine Arts and English Literature at the University of Melbourne in 1970 and a Certificate in Education at Oxford University in 1972. In 1977, she joined the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne, where she was Senior Curator of Indigenous Art on her retirement in 2021. She contributed to initiating and advancing the NGV’s Indigenous Art Collection from 1987 onwards. She has curated over 50 exhibitions, focused on increasing the visibility of Indigenous art. In 2016, she curated the NGV’s retrospective on Sally Gabori’s work, Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori: Dulka Warngiid—Land of All as well as Who’s Afraid of Colour?. She worked in 2021–22 as a curatorial advisor to the exhibition 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art presented at the University of Melbourne, then at the Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, in 2025. Judith Ryan is the author of books in the field, including Images of Power: Aboriginal Art of the Kimberley (1993); Color Power: Aboriginal Art Post 1984 (2004); and Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Desert Art (2011), all published by the NGV.