Amy Loogatha was born on a salt pan behind Nyinyilki on Bentinck Island.
As a child she lived as her people had for thousands of years — eating mullet and mangrove fruit, digging fresh water from swamps, and playing with shells and rocks on the beach while her parents went hunting.
When she was around seven years old, life changed forever.
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"It was early in the morning when we came from Bentinck," Ms Loogatha said.
"When we got to the beach, they separated the fathers and the mothers and took us."
Roger Kelly stands at the spot where he was taken off the boat by missionaries on Mornington Island and made to stand in line with the other children.
He is now in his 70s but his memories are vivid.
"My language name is Dulkalajingathi, that's the country where I was born, and my father, his name was Birrnayabangathi.
"When he got here they called him Kelly, and also they gave me my name, Roger Kelly."
Roger and Amy are part of the last surviving generation of Kaiadilt people to be born on their traditional lands on Bentinck Island.
The island is a 180-square-kilometre stretch of arid land and reefs surrounded by the rich waters of the southern Gulf of Carpentaria.
For thousands of years, the Kaiadilt people were one of the most isolated tribal groups in Australia.
They had minimal contact with other island tribes and continued to live traditionally into the mid-20th century, resisting the impact of the colonial occupation of Australia.
When missionaries came in the 1940s, the tiny island was home to less than 100 people.
A Presbyterian mission had been established in 1914 on Gununa-Mornington Island, the largest island in the Wellesley archipelago.
After a number of attempts over the following decades to convince the Kaiadilt people to leave their homeland, the missionaries succeeded in relocating the last remaining families in 1948.
"In school we were taught that Bentinck people were saved after our island was inundated by a tidal wave and there was no fresh water after years of drought," Kaiadilt woman Coreen Reading said.
"That's not the story I was told.
On Mornington Island, the children lived in boys and girls dormitories while their parents set up humpies on the outskirts of the mission, looking out towards Bentinck Island.
"We cried out night and day for our mothers and fathers ... they suffered for home," Ms Loogatha said.
It would be at least a decade after their removal from Bentinck Island before a Kaiadilt child would be born and survive.
"Women were either not having children or having stillborn children, or babies were dying on the breast," said Nicholas Evans, who has worked with the Kaiadilt community over many decades as a linguist, anthropologist and interpreter.
"I think it's just because people were so traumatised."
When Mr Evans first visited Mornington and Bentinck islands in the early 1980s to record and document the Kayardild language, there were about 45 fluent Kayardild speakers.
Now, just a handful remain.
The lives of these few speakers, the last generation born on Bentinck Island, capture the history of the colonial occupation of Australia — the dispossession and cultural genocide of Aboriginal people, and the movement towards self-determination and cultural renewal — in the span of a single lifetime.
"I think the loss of Kayardild has probably been more rapid than the loss of just about any language in the world," Mr Evans said.
"Culturally and spiritually, the language comes from the land, and when the Kaiadilt people were removed from their land, the missionaries segregated not just parents and children, but male and female siblings were also kept apart, disrupting the sibling link that is key to language transmission."
Separated from their homeland by 30 nautical miles of open sea, the Kaiadilt people became a minority population on Mornington Island but never stopped dreaming of a return.
The whole universe
Bentinck Island was given its European name by Matthew Flinders, who charted the Wellesley archipelago in 1802. Traditionally, the naming of the island is less straightforward.
In 1960 and 1962, anthropologist Norman Tindale took a number of Kaiadilt elders back to map the island and complete a genealogical survey.
Tindale listed more than 300 place names that capture the rich diversity of the small island and its creation stories.
"If you look at the map put together by Norman Tindale, he uses the words 'Dulka Warngiid' to name the entire island," Mr Evans said.
In 1986, almost 40 years after the removal of Kaiadilt people, an outstation was established at Nyinyilki on the south-eastern corner of Bentinck Island.
A small township of houses, a shop and airstrip were constructed, and from the early 1990s a small but stable population — most of them elders and young children in their care — lived on the island for the best part of a decade.
But without access to education and health facilities, or stable funding to maintain infrastructure on the island, permanent resettlement became an impossible dream.
The Nyinyilki outstation came to be known as the old ladies' camp, in honour of the small group of senior women who were born and raised on Bentinck Island, and reborn in the 21st century as artists in exile, part of the Kaiadilt art movement led by celebrated painter Sally Gabori.
"I can see how they're mapping their country, mapping the story places, mapping the family connections, mapping the foods in season," said Bereline Loogatha, gallery manager at the Mornington Island Art Centre.
Ms Gabori died in 2015, 10 years after she painted her first canvas. For the elders who remain, trips to Bentinck Island are increasingly infrequent as they succumb to the frailties of old age.
'Your child is back'
Christopher Loogatha makes the trip from Mornington Island every few weeks by boat to hunt turtle and dugong in his traditional waters.
"It's very important to keep my culture going and train my sons how to hunt," he said.
For Mr Loogatha, his sons and the men from his extended family, regular fishing trips are a crucial thread of connection between the Kaiadilt people and their homeland.
Back on Mornington Island, the Kaiadilt people are holding tight to this connection. The state school is working with the art centre and Kaiadilt elders to help revive their language and culture for the next generation.
"I think we all dream a little bit, and say, 'Yes, one day. One day we'll go home'," said Coreen Reading, who spent a year of her childhood living on Bentinck Island, learning traditional ways from her aunt and uncle.
"But we don't really talk seriously about moving back to Bentinck nowadays.
"I do believe that we are connected to the land through our heart and through our spirit, and when we pass, our spirit will always be there.
