SALLY GABORI AND HER KAIADILT PEOPLE
SALLY GABORI WAS OF THE Kaiadilt people who came from Bentinck and Sweers Islands in the South Wellesley Islands, in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria. They were the last group of coastal Aboriginal people in Australia to cease their autonomous hunter/gatherer/fisher lifestyle in 1947–48 when they were transported by missionaries to the Presbyterian Mission on Mornington Island. At the time the Kaiadilt had sustained themselves as a small isolated society of only several hundred people for an indefinite period of time (some thousands of years), continuing even when the colonial period swept past them for over a hundred years.
I first arrived at Mornington Mission in 1973, some twenty-five years after their move to the mission, to start my PhD research with the North Wellesley Islanders, the Lardil people, who had been missionised earlier, starting in 1914. Lardil Elder Lindsay Roughsey adopted me as a son and I established my first tent camp at the end of the Lardil Mission village which happened to
