It’s with good reason that The Rainbow Serpent by Dick Roughsey has continued to be an Australian children’s classic for 50 years.

This beloved work, which was first published in 1975 and is competing in Guardian Australia’s reader poll of the best Australian children’s picture books of all time, tells the powerful creation story of the Rainbow Serpent from the perspective of Roughsey (1920-85), a senior Lardil man from Mornington Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria and a gifted author and artist, whose traditional name was Goobalathaldin, meaning “rough seas”.

We should celebrate this book’s longevity and its legacy, and consider why Goobalathaldin’s story continues to be read to children around the world.

The stories of the Rainbow Serpent remain foremost at the heart of Aboriginal people, and should be for all people who live in Australia. These are stories of deep spiritual belief that connect us to the power of this country. They reflect a caring for country, and the cultural principles and laws that have remained steadfast and strong across millennia.

The Rainbow Serpent presents this ancestral being, also known as Goorialla, as a huge and powerful force shaping the world, whose dramatic movements creates the landscape. The serpent is at once inspiring and frightening, causing people to flee and take the form of Australia’s rich variety of birds and animal life – including the form of emu, turkey, brolga, barramundi, tortoise and possum.

The serpent creates the laws of human society and shows people how to perform ritual song and dance and how to care for their country and each other. Although the events in this story take place in the past when the world was being made, the Rainbow Serpent continues to live in the life of its people today.

This is the ancient law for this place. To quote Roughsey:

Now the remaining people have to look after all the animals, all the living things which were men and women in the beginning but who were too afraid of old Goorialla to remain as people. The shooting star racing across the sky at night is the eye of Goorialla – watching everyone.

How to imagine the unimaginable? This was the first book I know of that created a vision of the Rainbow Serpent from the Indigenous imagination. Roughsey gave us the licence to see what our minds had never been trained to visualise. He showed us the magnificence of the divine of this continent; he gave us the gift to see what was sacred in this place.

What shines through in the telling of this story, with its splendid artwork, is Roughsey’s graciousness, his generosity to share the spirit of our country and how lightly he carries the enormity of his cultural legacy.

I met Goobalathaldin in the 1970s when I lived for a year on Mornington Island. He was always kind and generous. His parents had to give him up when he was about eight years old. The repressive laws in Queensland that dominated the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples also meant the removal of Aboriginal children from their families.

He was put into the boys’ dormitory on the Mission on Mornington Island for the rest of his childhood, where he would rarely see or be with his family. The aim was to lessen the family’s influence over the lives of their children, who were being educated for assimilation into the white world of Australia.

What I remember of Dick Roughsey was how he carried himself: with the refined and sophisticated ease of a well-educated, worldly man. A Lardil man of superb intellect and magnanimity, he was cosmopolitan and well-travelled; he was dignified and spoke like an English gentleman, someone you might expect to come from a wealthy country estate in England.

But Dick also came from a very wealthy place culturally: he was deeply connected to the richness of Lardil traditional land and sea culture, its knowledge and bounty. His multifocal vision enabled him to create a gift that shares this important story from his homeland.

Dick was fond of saying that he spoke the Queen’s English better than most of her subjects in Australia and elsewhere. He credited the missionaries for teaching him how to speak like the queen.

Mind you, he never forgot how to speak fluent Lardil, or how to tell the law stories of his country that were passed down the generations through ceremony, storytelling and art; the lessons of holding on to what is important, of valuing the legacy of caring.

What a great cause for celebration that this book has remained in print and in our hearts, and continues to be told to children everywhere. I feel immense joy in knowing this book has remained in the Australian psyche – for all who live here and call this country home. This book continues to be cherished by families and teachers who have read Goobalathaldin’s seminal ancient creation story to thousands of children.

Dick Roughsey came from a long line of the wisest Lardil minds, and belonged to the combined cultures of the Rainbow Serpent in the Gulf of Carpentaria – where, as our Gangalidda elder and leader Murrandoo Yanner had said, “All we have got to give to the world is our humanity.”

Dick Roughsey’s work is a gift to us all.