The book traces the legacy of the child artists incarcerated at the
Carrolup Native Settlement in the 1940s and 1950s. Many coincidences
wereresponsible for bringing the new generation of Carrolup artworkto
broader audiences, especially the (re)discovery of the lost body of
Carrolup artwork in the United States in 2005.What might have remained a
regional story has in past years become the locus of an international
conversation, not only about the prodigious work of the children but
also about colonialism, cultural genocide, repatriation and the
protection of children's intellectual property.The conditions under
which the artwork was made and its international response, invite a
reexamination of how the production of hybrid forms of representation
became both resistance and adaptation to colonization under totalizing
conditions. Theauthor examines the children and their descendants within
the politics, the artworld, the economy and the culture of Australia,
past and present, and how they and their artwork were ontologically
conceived in a colonialist country.
Art historians and critics are not accustomed to writing about art made
by schoolchildren, but they are not ordinary schoolchildren; they were
survivors of the Stolen Generations who became known beyond the
settlement because of fortuitous circumstances. This multidimensional
story entails a confluence of priorities, values, worldviews, law,
justice, time, and space. Both literal and symbolic meanings can be
interpreted in the opening of a box of Indigenous children's art missing
for 40 years, searched for by anthropologists with academic interests.
One cannot help but notice the irony of the misplacement of both the
contents of the box and its owners and custodians--that the people whose
legacy was embodied in those works had few options based on the law of
the land from which they had historically been omitted.
Aboriginal arts have proliferated in both remote and metropolitan
locations. And yet their success is one of the great paradoxes in
Australian visual arts. Indigenous art is viewed as central,
significant, and even indispensable in Australian visual culture. Their
position is reflected in government and private resources committed to
Indigenous artists and their inclusion in the artworld. But while the
artworks are centrally located in Australian cultural public practice,
and their financial returns to the nation's economy are substantial,
Indigenous people remain sidelined.
