“The title Medicine Pocket refers to Country. The Gija name for this place, Mendoowoorrji, resonates with the Ngarranggarni, more generally known as the Dreaming, the parallel time dimension in which plants, animals and landscapes were created and in which the laws governing much human behaviour were instituted.” (Georges Petitjean, Paddy Bedford, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2006, p. 14)

“Mendoowoorrji is the general name given to the line of hills between Thoonbi and Thoowoonggoonarrin. Medicine Pocket is a ngarranggarni place with ‘living water’, and was an important camping area before the arrival of Europeans. It is part of the artist’s mother’s dreaming. Two dreamtime men hit each other with sticks there and became part of the country. Wanggarnaban (‘the place that has crows’) is in part of Mendoowoorrji. Wanggarnal the crow camped there when she was a woman in dreamtime.” (Linda Michael, Paddy Bedford, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2006, p. 134)

"In the painting Mendoowoorrji – Medicine Pocket 2004, Bedford evokes the narrative that embodies a hillscape that stretches between the sites of Thoonbi and Thoowoonggoonarrin on his mother’s Country and an important camping place for Gija families before the arrival of Europeans. Here, two men in ancestral times fought violently with sticks and became the landscape. The ‘living water’ found along these hills is suggested by the luminosity or transparency of his paint, achieved though his wet-on-wet technique, which requires a fast method of application. This became a characteristic of his paintings made after 2004, most likely as a result of Bedford working consistently in gouache as a fluid and spontaneous practice alongside his larger paintings on canvas." (Vanessa Merlino, Head of Research, D’Lan Contemporary)