r e a The Native Institute 371.979915 Installation – sound, light, vinyl language & wood Size variable
‘The Native Institute 371.979915’ is a series of works responding to the impact of The Native Institute on the local Indigenous people of this area known as the Darug people and their families. I am examining this history through the voices of children, Indigenous language, poetry, political statements and songs; and the ongoing history that this country has continually engaged in through establishing policies to ‘manage’ and ‘control’ the “native”.
Acknowledgements and credits: Damian Castaldi, technical consultant and sound collaborator with artist, r e a.
Carson Biddle age 10, (Parents, Jennifer Biddle and Jack Marshall) Pavlo Cotis age 12, (Parents, Tina Cotis and Paul Howard), Shaylee Williams age 10, (Parents, Shannon Williams-Baxter and Keith Baxter), Quaiden Williams age 10, (Parents, Emma-Jane Williams and Noel Riley), Mt.Druitt Darug Indigenous Children’s Choir, Leanne Tobin and Jacinta Tobin, d/Lux/MediaArts - directional cone speakers Gail Kelly, creative consultant.
THE NATIVE INSTITUTE Daniel Boyd, Robyn Caughlan, Karla Dickens, r e a, Leanne Tobin, Jason Wing Blacktown Arts Centre – 5 July – 21 September 1. Karla Dickens
r e a was born in 1962 in Coonabarabran in northern NSW. Her language groups are Gamilaraay and Wailwan. r e a’s interdisciplinary arts practice examines history, memory, body politics and language, and the construction of Indigenous (Australia) identity. r e a has exhibited nationally and internationally since 1992 and her work is held in major public institutions in Australia.
2. Robyn Caughlan
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3. Sites of Experimentation
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Thank for the kind support of the parents and their children who contributed to the collaborative sound work:
4. r e a 5. Leanne Tobin 6a 6b
6a/6b. Jason Wing 8
The Native Institute Project was led by artist Brook Andrew and co-curated by Brook Andrew and Paul Howard.
7. Daniel Boyd
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8. Karla Dickens
Blacktown Arts Centre staff Manager Arts & Cultural Development/ Director Blacktown Arts Centre Cultural Planning Coordinator Visual Arts Curator Performing Arts Curator Project Officer Operations Coordinator Administration Officer Administration Officer Administration Trainee Exhibition Installers Designer
Blacktown Arts Centre
78 Flushcombe Rd, Blacktown NSW 2148 Open 10am – 5pm Tuesday – Saturday T: (02) 9839 6558 E: artscentre@blacktown.nsw.gov.au www.artscentre.blacktown.nsw.gov.au
Jenny Bisset Monir Rowshan Paul Howard Maria Mitar Paschal Daantos Berry Miguel Olmo Sanki Tennakoon Dayna Coyle Monique Muscat Tim Dale, Krisjoe Fuertes, Marius Jastkowiak, Sam Villalobos Gary Vicente
The Blacktown Native Institute The Blacktown Native Institute was opened by Govenor Brisbane in 1823, and operated from 1823-1829 under the direction of the Church Missionary Society. It was a residential school for young Aboriginal and Maori children established for their civilisation and education. In 1823 the boarding school became active in Blacktown, after it was moved from its original site in Parramatta, and after six years of operation the Blacktown Native Institute was recognised as a failed experiment. The place around the Native Institute was known as ‘The Black Town’. Both of these institute sites are significant to Australian history and local Aboriginal people because they are the first sites in Australia where the removal and institutionalization of Aboriginal children is known to have occurred. Relationships remain with associated families and some continue to live in the Blacktown area. The Blacktown Native Institution site is valued by the contemporary Aboriginal community and the wider Australian community as a landmark in the history of cross-cultural engagement in Australia. For Aboriginal people in particular, it represents a key historical site symbolising dispossession and child removal. The site is also important to the Sydney Maori community as an early tangible link with colonial history of trans-Tasman cultural relations and with the history of children removed by missionaries.
Statement of Significance, NSW State Heritage Register
Robyn Caughlan
Civilising series
The Ancestors and I Walk the Same Footprints But At Different Times You See
Mixed media Size variable
Printed banners 200 x 70 cm each
I want you to come on a journey with me and look back on history. You can rip things down to the ground as if it never happened but mark my word this land still speaks. I hear their voices whisper to me. I see the past, I see the now, I see the future too as that is who I am. Just imagine how you would feel if this happened to you. The land still cries, many souls have died but the footprints are still in this land. I still hear their voices whisper to me and I feel their pain and sense their shame for something they did not even do.
Robyn Caughlan was born in Westmead in 1949. She is the 6th child of a mother descended from the Darug and Darkinjung people and an Irish Catholic Father. She moved to a foster home when she was five and attended convent schools until leaving at the age of 13.
Karla Dickens
The Native Institute was born from good intentions. Those who knew better wanted to create a place to change, mould, and reinvent the natives into a mirror of their own standards, principles, morals and civilised ways. It was Australia’s birth place of white-washing the savage native, a training ground for work skills and the ways of white authority, white domestic skills and farming, a crash course in assimilation for those young enough not to resist. Given my interests in things handmade I have been pulled towards The Native Institute’s training of young girls in the civilising skills such as needle work. I considered the tears and grief of the people and lives that the process of civilising had touched.
Karla Dickens is a Wiradjuri artist, born in Sydney in 1967. She began her formal training as an artist when she enrolled at the National Art School in Darlinghurst, Sydney in 1991, obtaining a Fine Arts Diploma in 1993 and a Bachelor in Fine Arts in 2000. Karla Dickens is represented by The Hughes Gallery, Sydney.
Bible series Mixed media Size variable
Leanne Tobin Suffer the Little Children
I came to the conclusion, reading and researching The Native Institute, that maybe it was designed by people who honestly appeared to have the ‘good intentions’ of the Natives in mind. Even though I believe this, it hasn’t made it any easier to understand. With a symbol of goodness and rightfulness I drilled holes through leather covers and old pages of bibles. I chose sharp objects to pierce through a symbol of goodness taking aim at compulsory church visits, bible studies and missionaries that were a large part of the civilisation process in The Native Institute. The bibles are uncomfortable to hold in your hand. I used porcupine quills and snake skins to acknowledge the denied culture of the first Australians.
Ochre, acrylic, wash and charcoal on canvas 122 x 91 cm
‘Suffer the Little Children’ depicts the Native Institute pupils being paraded and presented to the dignitaries and their families at the time of the annual Feast Day. There they recited prayers and sang hymns in an effort to show the progress made in this mass experiment.
The Humble Petitioner Ochre, collage, charcoal and acrylic on canvas 122 x 162 cm
‘The Humble Petitioner’ shows Darug legend, Maria Lock, writing her numerous letters to the governor. She would sign these letters as ‘your humble petitioner’. The possum on her shoulder is a collective Boorooberongal totem; the rabbit escaping alludes to the
English and the feral element they introduced in their ignorance about country. Behind Maria in the background is the Native Institute building at Blacktown and over on the hill, the Feast Day is being held outside St John’s church at Parramatta. This was used as a collection point for the children to be enrolled and the adults to be placed on a census. The cyclone fence is like a time portal linking the past with the present day fence that now surrounds the vacant site.
Leanne Tobin is descended from the Boorooberongal of the Hawkesbury River, (what we know as the Derrubbin) and the Warmali clan of the Darug (Prospect area). She is from a long line of storytellers and her art is an extension of that role. The Institute and the Black’s Town is part of her family story.
Daniel Boyd A Shift in Paradigm Takes Time Oil paint, archival glue on linen, found rock engraving, cardboard Size variable
‘A Shift in Paradigm Takes Time’ is about the complexities inherent in cross cultural interaction throughout Australian history. Standing on the land opposite the Native Institute gave me the best sense of the period in history and transported me back to the time when the land was given to Colebee and Nurragingy from Governor Macquarie, the first Aboriginal land grant in Australia. I also felt the choice of land was strategic with a large and very important silcrete deposit as well as the proximity to the Native Institute. The composite image is made of multiple lenses, looking at landscape’s residual memory and the memory of the relationship between Colebee and Governor Macquarie and how multiple perspectives make up our knowledge of landscape and the people in it.
Daniel Boyd was born in 1982 in Cairns and studied at the National Art School in Canberra. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally since 2005 and is held in major public collections in Australia and the UK. Daniel Boyd is represented by Roslyn Oxley 9 Gallery, Sydney and Kaliman/Rawlins, Melbourne.
Jason Wing 28 December (Within Arm’s Reach) Fabric, metal frames, single channel projection Size variable
Double Crossing Aluminium sign, vinyl 134 x 130 cm
During my research I came across an article describing the Institute’s open wooden fencing as a structure that ‘facilitated the desire of Aboriginal parents to watch their children at work and play’. When I first visited the Native Institute, I was haunted by these visions of mothers, fathers, uncles and aunties setting up provisional camps along the perimeter of the site, patiently waiting for weeks on end, in the hope of catching a glimpse of their child. Allowed to see their children for just one day each year, the 28th of December, the ghostly images of these broken parents in their makeshift lean-to’s remain etched in my mind. In ‘Double Crossing’ I have transformed a railway crossing sign into a Christian cross. Missions such as the Native Institute mark a very particular and poignant moment in our history, where two vastly different cultural ideologies came to a head. Rather than carving out a space for both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people to exercise their cultural and spiritual beliefs, Christian missionaries attempted to reduce Aboriginal culture until it was virtually invisible. Misled to believe that they would receive eternal salvation if they entrusted their lives in god and abandoned the ‘old way’, Aboriginal people were ultimately betrayed by White Australia.
Jason Wing is a Sydney-based artist of both Chinese and Aboriginal heritage. Born in 1977, Wing’s formative years were spent immersed in Asian cultures in the western Sydney suburb of Cabramatta.