The John Curtin Gallery presents Koorliny Mia Whadjuk Boodja (Carrolup Artworks Back Home), an exhibition of Carrolup Artworks created by Aboriginal children of Australia’s Stolen Generations who were forcibly detained at the Carrolup Native Settlement near Katanning, Western Australia in the 1940s.
Almost all of The Herbert Mayer Collection of Carrolup Artwork will be shown in this exhibition as well as new Carrolup works recently donated to the Curtin University Art Collection.
The exhibition marks the launch of an ambitious campaign, led by Nyungar elders and the wider community, to create a permanent new home for the works – the Carrolup Centre for Truth-telling.
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Curtin University is embarking upon an ambitious project to establish a permanent, dedicated, and easily accessible home that honours The Herbert Mayer Collection of Carrolup Artworks, and allows its important lessons to be widely shared with our local, national and international communities.
The Carrolup Centre for Truth-telling will be a perpetual flame to draw all Australians together to share their stories and produce knowledge – knowledge that improves our culture and our society’s capacity to organise itself around policies of inclusion.
Around this permanent axis of Carrolup art there will be associated exhibits and evolving programs of community engagement, as well as national and international programs of research. These programs will explore the improvement of the human condition by overcoming prejudice and injustice.
The Centre will be open to everyone and our many visitors from across Australia and beyond, as well as employ virtual and other technologies to engage national and international audiences. Because the lessons of Carrolup will resonate with the experiences of many First Nations people around the world, the Centre will have an international reach.
The Carrolup Centre will be located within the John Curtin Gallery precinct on Curtin’s Perth campus. We are raising funds to create a dedicated space for the Carrolup artworks and to develop programs of engagement around them.
The cost of establishing the Centre and its programs is estimated at $15 million.
The Carrolup Centre for Truth-telling
“The Carrolup Centre will commemorate how young Aboriginal children – forcibly separated from their families, isolated, segregated, traumatised and living in an unknown place – still found beauty and connection to Country through their art. It will be an enduring reminder that while racism seeks to destroy all that is good about a people, it never can. Like water, cultural beauty and goodness always finds a way; at Carrolup, that way was through children.”
Tony Hansen, Chair of the Carrolup Elders Reference Group
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