Exhibitions

Athol Farmer, Kangaroo Water, 2008. Courtesy of the artist

....The exhibition Noongar Boodja: Contemporary Aboriginal Art, Ecology and Culture is a documentation of the loss of land, speech, and culture used by a people for 40,000 years. The conditions under which the works in this exhibition were made and the international response to them, as a result of the recent rediscovery of drawings by children of the Australian Stolen Generation at the Picker Art Gallery at Colgate University, give rise to new questions about the power of cultural forms of representation.

Parnell Dempster, Untitled, 1953
Courtesy of the Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University, x260.43

....Young artists such as Revel Cooper, Reynold Hart, Parnell Dempster, and Barry Loo, who had produced a coherent landscape style in the 1940s and 50s, unwittingly became the cause of its current rebirth. Troy Bennell, Athol Farmer, and Graham Taylor represent the several artists who have inherited this landscape genre now called The Carrolup Style.

....Carrolup was one of 60 government settlements and missions operating between the late 1800s and early 1970s that forcibly segregated young Aboriginal children, not only from the white social structure, but also from their own families, while purporting to offer them greater opportunities in that same society. The children of these settlements became known as the Stolen Generation. On February 13, 2008 the newly elected Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, made a public apology to the Stolen Generation.

....The introduction of Western materials was the result of colonial influences and particularly the white art advisors who saw the possibility of marketability in permanency. The Carrolup children capitalized on these new materials to record what they saw in the present as well as a past they imagined and to which they desired to return. Like the art of the incarcerated, the children reached beyond the fences that confined them against their will. Several drawings show Noongars in ritual paint, hunting, or dancing by the campfire, celebrating the disappearing world of Corroborees (traditional Noongar dances and ceremonies) performed at the outskirts of the Carrolup settlement where parents camped and waited for furtive visits from their children.

Reynold Hart, A Native Corroboree, 1945-53.
Courtesy of the Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University, x260.92

....The boys were skilled in the subtle reclamation of their land by populating the landscape with grass trees, also known as “black boys,” a presence which, by proxy, allows the young artists to act upon the land itself. While drawn in a recognizably Western style, the work suggests nostalgia for pre-contact Australia. Australian author Michele Grossman suggests that the style of the paintings is also worth noting because of the way in which they draw on, but also revise, Western art traditions and genres. “They do not announce themselves as distinctively indigenous in the way that indigenous art has subsequently come to be known and understood” (M. Grossman, personal communication, March, 2007).

....Because of the overwhelming lack of agency in determining their own future, Aboriginal self consciousness and self-representation are considered inherently political acts of resistance (Moreton-Robinson, 2003). They may not necessarily be explicit or intentional, as indeed the children's works are not. The contemporary Carrolup Style is complex in terms of Noongar identity, culture, and the subject positioning of the artists. While conceived in the artistic vocabulary of the “white man,” they defiantly transcend that vocabulary, and therefore demand that they be understood: to learn the back story of the artists who made them.

Graham Taylor, Kangaroos at Sunset, 2008..Courtesy of the artist

....The contemporary artists’ stories are inextricably connected to the children's through family ties or inspiration. For example, Reynold Hart was Bennell’s grand-uncle, and his aunt was married to Revel Cooper. Mum can remember watching Reynold Hart and Revel Cooper…cause Mum grew up on the reserve there see, and Mum and her brothers would…probably watch old boy paint. Yeah mum’s brothers they were deadly artists and I used to sit there and watch them (Pushman & Smith Walley, 2006).

....As a young man Farmer walked on the road where Revel Cooper painted outside a prison near Katanning. As a child I used to sit and watch Revel Cooper paint. I was lucky enough to be able to see him at work, and observe his style. I’ll never forget the way he captured the image of a grass tree with his brush. This has never left me and I still paint them myself in the same manner (Pushman & Smith Walley, 2006).

....Farmer was also influenced by Bella Kelly who painted on the Tambellup Reserve. She was the mother of one of the young Carrolup artists, Claude Kelley, and artist Lance Chadd speculates that she might have been the source of the style produced by the boys in the Carrolup Settlement School.

....Taylor’s aunt showed him a portrait of his uncle painted by Revel Cooper. Taylor went from settlement to reserve, and finally to Freemantle Prison as a 17-year-old in the late 1970s where he met Cooper. Cooper, who was in his 30s, taught the younger inmates how to paint. Freemantle prison has since become a museum of the works of art made by former Carrolup artists and their young pupils. I took it all in but I wasn’t really interested in painting then, I was interested in getting out. Later I went to my aunty’s and there was nothing to eat. That’s when I did my first oil painting of a landscape. We sold it at the store for thirty dollars and bought a big heap of food….Recently I saw Lance Chadd and Shane Pickett painting and I saw they were making a living at it. You know in school you have heroes. I became a fan of theirs. I wanted to be like them (Taylor, personal communication, May, 2007).

Graham Taylor, Yongka Sunset, 2008
Courtesy of the artist

....A Noongar artist said, “When we go into the bush we see something entirely different from a non-Indigenous person.” This ability to “see” the land might be responsible for their preternatural ability to record it and the canvas becomes its replacement. Noongar artist Shane Pickett, who was Bennell’s teacher, believes that the ancestral phenomenon of Dreaming – hearing the voices of the ancestors since the beginning of time – was released in the pastels and watercolors introduced to Noongars for the first time through the children. This connection might be the cause for what critics have described as the mystical nature of the work.

....The Carrolup genre has, therefore, not only produced a new style, but also a forum for the legacy of Noongar people to be shared, communicated and taught to the next generation as well as non-indigenous peoples throughout the world. Exhibitions of their work that take place far from their country provide the opportunity for the world to become aware of a too recent history of the suppression of first peoples.

Troy Bennell, Wilmen Boodjar, 2008. Courtesy of the artist