The Long Way Home | Zara Bambling

At just twenty-three, Zarabella Bambling is building a practice that feels deeply rooted in Country life. Living and painting in Roma, Queensland, her work is reflective of a lifelong love of rural Australia — its people, its vastness, its stories carried in dust and light.

What began as a hobby to help fund her university studies has grown into something far more significant: a clear and confident pursuit of life as a full-time artist. 

Zarabella’s artistic lineage runs through her family. Inspired by her late grandmother, Paddy Bambling — the founder of ‘Penwhaupell Pottery’ — she continues a legacy of making that honours rural life. Where her grandmother shaped clay, Zarabella works in paint, embracing an impressionistic style that captures the bush in colour and movement.

Her donated piece, The Long Way Home, is a colourful mustering landscape. The work reflects her signature approach: expressive brushstrokes, warm tonal shifts, and a sense of motion that feels lived rather than staged. She paints not from observation alone, but from memory — the rhythm of cattle being brought in, the hush before dusk, the long ride back toward homestead lights.