1. Country
2. Families
3. Family
4. Glossaries and vocabularies
5. Grandmothers
6. Home
7. Relationship to place
8. Travel
9. Yidiny / Yidindji people (Y117) (Qld SE55-06)

This book is done in a picture format, although it has more text than a standard picture book. It tells the story of Kutabah and her younger brothers Warabal (almost a man) and Bidu, who is still small. Her family are camped in their country, and her father tells everyone that the next day they will travel to Nana Garna’s country. She is one of the Yidinji people of the Atherton Tablelands, and when she married, she went with her husband to his country and had never gone back. Now that she is getting older, she has decided she wants to be in her own country again.

Kutabah and Warabal are excited to see the rainforests and the rivers, so different from the country they know. Before dawn, they are too excited to sleep, so they get up, and with their young brother Bidu, walk down to the stream and bathe. While they are gone the rest of the family pack up and start the journey. They leave behind some bedding and supplies for the young people – it will be a test for them to travel to Nana’s land alone – one of the first tests to adulthood.

Although Kutabah and Warabal are initially worried, they realise that their family has already given them the knowledge to travel on their own. They read the signs left for them which point the way, and they gather and cook their own food. Eventually they arrive in Nana’s beautiful land, and there is a big celebration that they have passed their test.

The illustrations of the land are bold and colourful. The land of Kutabah’s people is dominated by reds and browns, but when they arrive in Nana’s land it is greens and blues, and full of flowers and butterflies. The colour fills the illustrated pages, with no white space, giving full immersion into place. Most page spreads consist of an illustration on one side and the text on a plain white page on the other, although there are a couple of double page spreads where a single illustration takes up both pages and there is minimal text over the painting.

At the end of the book is a short Yidinji language wordlist and a biography of the author. Delphine Sarago-Kendrick is descended from the Yidinji and Jirrbal people of Far North Queensland.

1. Dulabed and Malanbarra Yidinji Aboriginal Corporation, [n.d.] ‘People. Country. Culture.’ https://www.dmyac.org/people-country-culture
2. Wikipedia, 2020. ‘Yidiny people’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yidiny_people
3. Aboriginal Language, [n.d.] ‘Yidinji language’ https://learnaborginallanguage.weebly.com/-yidinji-language.html
4. Australians Together, 2020. ‘The importance of land’ https://australianstogether.org.au/discover/indigenous-culture/the-importance-of-land/
5. Australians Together, 2020. ‘Indigenous kinship’ https://australianstogether.org.au/discover/indigenous-culture/kinship/