Marribank

Marribank

class=notpageimage|

Location in Western Australia

Marribank, earlier known as Carrolup, was the site of one of two large Native Settlements for Indigenous Australians established by the office of the Protector of Aborigines of the Western Australian State Government.

The area was reclassified from a mission to native settlement in 1915 and was initially known as Carrolup not far from the Western Australian town of Katanning, after complaints by white farmers and settlers about the Aboriginal fringe dwellers living north of the town, who were attending school to the south. Together with settlements at Moore River, Roelands and Gnowangerup, at one stage it formed part of a number of institutions that housed most of the Noongar people of the South West of Western Australia. The Carrolup facility was closed in 1922 with all residents transferred to the Moore River Settlement.

The "Aboriginal Act" of 1909 denied the rights of parents and made all part-Aboriginal children wards of the state. Aboriginal children were taken from their parents, especially if they had a European or part-European ancestry, in order to break the possibility of being socialised within traditional Aboriginal language and culture, as a part of a government policy which has become known as the Stolen Generations. It was hoped by the Protector of Aborigines that boys would be trained as agricultural labourers, and girls would obtain work as domestic servants. Children living at Carrolup of marriageable age had to obtain official government permission to marry. As the official policy was acknowledged as "smoothing the pillow of a dying race", the "breeding out" of Aboriginal racial characteristics was encouraged. The officials took little or no action in cases of sexual abuse of girls by those officially in charge of them.

The settlement was opened again in 1940 as a farm training school for Indigenous boys and in 1952 was handed over to the Baptist Church and was renamed as Marribank.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, as Carrolup Native Settlement, the site became the setting of a Noongar (South-West Aboriginal)Art movement among the children resident there, famous for its portrayals of local Western Australian scenes at sunset. An exhibition of Carrolup artists was organised in Perth, in a number of Australian towns and cities and in London. A number of prominent Western Australian Aboriginal Artists started their work at Marribank, and were the subject of two national travelling benchmark exhibitions curated by the Director of the Berndt Museum of Anthropology at The University of Western Australia, 'Nyungar Landscapes' containing elements of the extensive Melvie, Stan and Gael Phillips Collection donated to the Berndt Museum and (with Noongar artist Sandra Hill) 'Aboriginal Artists of the South-West, containing items from the Noel and Lily White Collection presented to the Museum by Noelene and Ross White.

As part of a community initiated project, commenced in 1987, two Noongar trainees participated in a teaching program in museology at the Anthropology Research Museum, as the Berndt Museum of Anthropology was then known. Tina Hansen and Cora Farmer were funded by the Aboriginal Arts Board of the Australia Council to work towards establishing a Cultural Centre at Marribank/Carrolup. Members of the community had sought assistance from John Stanton after they heard of his interest in the Carrolup children’s drawings produced in the 1946-50 period. The Museum had been actively acquiring examples of these drawings for several years. Copies of these and related materials, including photographs, manuscripts and press clippings, were lodged with the Cultural Centre, which was funded by the Australian Bicentennial Authority, and opened in 1988. Tina Hansen and Cora Farmer learnt, while they were on placement with the Museum, collections management skills, display techniques, and photographic and videographic processes. They both spent the following year refining documentation on historical photographs. The first exhibition, in one room of the Old Girls’ Dormitory, traced the history of Carrolup Native Settlement, as it was known, and the emergence of the ‘bush landscape’ school of art there. Another room displayed contemporary Noongar works. A further gallery, which focussed on the Marribank years, opened in 1992.

The 'lost' collection of Carrolup children’s art was made by Florence Rutter, principally to exhibit and sell on behalf of the children, in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, through the Aboriginal Children’s Trust that she set up in London. The collection includes a personal selection that Florence made for both herself and her family. However, she lost all her own money, together with that held by the Trust, to a con man. Destitute, she advertised its availability and was able to sell it to Herbert Mayer of New York city.

Mrs Rutter passed away in 1958, her dreams shattered. Some say she died of a broken heart. Herbert Mayer gifted the collection to his old university, Colgate (Class of 1929), in upstate New York in 1966. This is the collection that Howard Morphy ‘found’ at the Picker Gallery at Colgate University in 2004. A year later, Athol Farmer, Ezzard Flowers and John Stanton travelled to the United States to inspect the collection and to select items for inclusion in the 2006 ‘Koorah Coolingah’ exhibition at Katanning, with a parallel exhibition at the Western Australian Museum in Perth, which were part of the Perth International Arts Festival (PIAF).

In late 2018, David Clark and John Stanton set up an informational Web site, www.carrolup.info to focus attention on this amazing story, which stretches over eighty years.

External links

• The Carrolup Story