'Balun Gawarima – River Story' by Bundjalung artist Melody Popple

'Balun Gawarima – River Story' by Indigenous artist Melody Popple explores the cultural significance of water on Bundjalung Country through bush dyeing, natural pigment processes, and visual story-mapping.

Created across major waterways of Bundjalung Jagun, the work responds to the lived realities of a post-flood landscape, where communities hold both fear and reverence for water and reflects on water as a transformative force that ruptures and repairs, destroys and replenishes, carrying both trauma and healing. Through repeated acts of returning to waterways, sitting with place, collecting, listening, and creating, the practice becomes an act of relationality and reciprocity – an offering back to Country.