Aboriginal Healing,
Sharing Culture |
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We will celebrate the children's artistic talents, as well as their scholastic, musical and sporting achievements, and their strong personal values and sense of community. We will show how the children’s achievements challenged the core foundation of a government’s racist policies.
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'Camping Scene' by Revel Cooper, a watercolour and ink on paper, 30.5 x 24.5 cm, 1947 - 1948. Stan, Melvin and Gael Phillips Collection, held at the Berndt Museum of Anthropology, The University of Western Australia.
Seventy years ago, traumatised Aboriginal children of the Carrolup Native Settlement in South West Australia ‘reached out’ to white society with their beautiful landscape drawings. These drawings won international acclaim, but the children's efforts were eventually thwarted by a government decision to close Carrolup School. Sharing Culture Founder David Clark is now working with John Stanton, former Director of the Berndt Museum of Anthropology at the University of Western Australia, on a new project that will help the children reach out again, not with just their art, but also with their enthralling Story. We will work with David's long-time collaborator, web developer Ash Whitney of Wired Up Wales. We will celebrate the children's artistic talents, as well as their scholastic, musical and sporting achievements, and their strong personal values and sense of community. We will show how the children’s achievements challenged the core foundation of a government’s racist policies. Our project will also celebrate the achievements of Noel White, the teacher who helped the children overcome their trauma and inspired their art, and the 71-year old Englishwoman Florence Rutter who exhibited the Carrolup art on both sides of the world to much public acclaim. We will highlight the roles played by other people who helped the children during their time at Carrolup, and after the school closure when the children faced the adversities of living in a white-dominated society that considered them 'inferior'. We are grateful to those people helping us with this project, including Noelene White, the daughter of Carrolup teacher Noel White. She has provided us with access to treasured family items related to her family's life at Carrolup Native Settlement. |
The Impact of Colonisation
The colonisation of Australia by Europeans had a massive negative impact on a peoples and culture that has existed for over 50,000 years. The 1905 Aborigines Act of Western Australia subjected Aboriginal people to tyrannical control. It gave a white Chief Protector legal guardianship over all Aboriginal children.
Chief Protector Mr A. O. Neville developed a plan for setting up 'native settlements', run by the government, where children taken from their parents would be educated and trained for unskilled occupations. He also intended to ‘breed out’ Aboriginality through inter-marriage within the white community. A cornerstone of these policies was the belief that Aboriginal people are 'intellectually inferior' to white people. Carrolup, located 40 kilometres from the South West Australian town of Katanning, was one of the native settlements established by Mr. Neville. Aboriginal children of Carrolup in early 1940s.
Running WildRevel Cooper, a Noongar boy, was made a Ward of the State and sent to Carrolup at the age of six in 1940.
In a letter written in 1960 about life on the Settlement, Revel presented a vivid picture of Aboriginal children 'running wild' in squalid conditions. They received minimal care and education for most of the war years. The children were traumatised and dehumanised by their experiences. The children started to receive an education when teacher Mrs. Olive Elliot arrived at Carrolup in 1945. Mrs. Elliot and the children developed a mutual affection, but the former decided the children need the firm hand of a male teacher. She convinced Noel White to take up the teaching position at Carrolup. So began a magical relationship between the Aboriginal children and their white teacher. > Connection & Public Acclaim |