'Barramundi Story 2' by Uncle Colin Jones

"This is called Barramundi Story and its telling the story of the Barramundi. The word Barramundi is only one of our language groups’ word for that fish and it comes from the Rockhampton area.

Barramundi in language means ‘big scale fish’ and if you ever see a real Barramundi, you’ll know that they’ve got quite large scales. Now, interestingly, when the Barramundi are born, there all born male and it’s only when they get to a certain size and sometimes with the chemical reaction between the salt and fresh water, they change to female. The Barramundi can live in fresh or salt water, they swim up the rivers to the fresh water as well.

So the Barramundi is a very valuable food source for our people. We know the seasons when the Barramundi’s available and when they’re spawning and breeding. And here [on the painting] you can see the blue circles representing the waterholes because in the central part of Cape York peninsula when the wet season comes, all those waterholes link up and the rivers flow in to each other so the Barramundi can migrate. So you’ve still got the yellow sections [on the painting again], the orange colours of the ochre of the soil around the flood plains and on the whole, the water connects up, so the Barramundi move in that area. And you’ll see the footprints, our people, following around from waterhole to waterhole to collect the Barramundi. And it’s just telling the story of the Barramundi as a food source. And the two little hands up to the right hand side are saying; we belong to this land.