Aboriginal Artworks to Return to Australia
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Version 0 of 1. In a homecoming sweetened with poetic justice, a collection of drawings and paintings by Aboriginal children living in a settlement camp in the 1940s and 1950s will be returned to Australia. The trove of more than 100 pieces is to be formally transferred on Wednesday from Colgate University, in Hamilton, N.Y., to Curtin University in Perth, officials said. The young artists were confined at the Carrolup River Native Settlement, a government institution in Western Australia. The children there produced art so distinctive and so technically sophisticated that it received considerable acclaim when it toured Europe in the 1950s. But they also represent a tragic chapter in Australian history: from the 1910s to the early 1970s, as many as 100,000 mostly mixed-race Aboriginal children were taken from their families under government programs meant to assimilate them. Most children were badly fed and housed in the internment camps, which were eventually condemned as racist and destructive. “It’s just a wonderful opportunity to build on our collaboration with Curtin and return this art to Australia,” Douglas A. Hicks, the provost and dean of the faculty at Colgate, said of the gift. Herbert A. Mayer, a businessman and 1929 Colgate graduate, donated the collection in 1966, but it languished in the Picker Art Gallery archives at the university until 2004. That year, a visiting scholar from Australia immediately recognized the work of children from Carrolup. Additional drawings were discovered by Picker staff members, and in 2005 five were put on display at the Picker, drawing international attention. Australians knew the story as a chapter in the tale of the “stolen generations,” as depicted in the 2002 film “Rabbit-Proof Fence,” about Aboriginal children who try to escape their internment camp. The Mayer collection encompasses 119 pieces, mostly pastels and landscapes, often in vivid shades of orange, yellow and blue. The images of native people, kangaroos and designs from Aboriginal culture reflect the rich heritage of the Noongar (pronounced NEW-ahr), or Nyungar, people from southwestern Australia. Incorporating native and European elements, the art is not just a reminder of a painful past, but also an influence on modern Aboriginal artists, with its use of color and light. One pastel, titled “Down to Drink,” shows tangerine-colored hills under a dark blue sky as kangaroos approach a stream. The young artist, Parnell Dempster, wrote in a letter published in the 1952 book “Child Artists of the Australian Bush”: “Now I am 14 years old. I would like to be something good. I don’t like camp life.” Repatriation of artwork by American museums can often be contentious, but in this case the children of Mr. Mayer said their father would have approved, Mr. Hicks said. The question of repatriation arose in 2006 when Colgate lent the works for the Perth International Arts Festival, said John E. Stanton, the director of the Berndt Museum of Anthropology at the University of Western Australia, in an e-mail message. Other institutions in Australia were considered, but Curtin was selected because of collaboration and exchange programs in the past eight years between the two institutions, Mr. Hicks said, and because Curtin has the highest enrollment of Noongar students among Australian universities. Ellen Percy Kraly, a demographer and professor of geography at Colgate, said of the choice, “We had to develop a relationship with an institution that would preserve the work forever.” The art will be used for research projects, Jeanette Hackett, vice chancellor of Curtin, said in an e-mail message. And there is also potential for a scholarship program between Curtin and Colgate, focused on Noongar students, she said. “Curtin will exhibit the works both locally and nationally, with special emphasis on exhibiting the work locally, to ensure all Noongar people have access,” Ms. Hackett wrote. |