‘On May 20th the school was duly opened by me (Noel White). There was a full attendance. It is obvious that a practical form of Hygiene is most necessary to train the pupils in the daily duty of cleanliness. The children have sores on the hands and with the co-operation of the Settlement Staff a double check is done daily to see that the children comply with the usual requirements. ‘ Noel White, Carrolup School Diary, 24 May, 1946 (his first entry)
Eighty years ago today, Noel White began teaching in the school at the Carrolup Native Settlement in the South-West of Western Australia. This is the beginning of the remarkable story of the Aboriginal child artists of Carrolup, whose landscape artworks would travel and be appreciated in four different continents. Many of the artworks are housed in the Berndt Museum at the University of Western Australia and in John Curtin Gallery at Curtin University.
A story of children who had been removed from their Aboriginal families as part of government policy—leading to the Stolen Generations—and taken to live in the squalor of the government-run settlement.
A story of how a non-Aboriginal schoolteacher, who was not an artist, was able to inspire this group of boys to create their beautiful artworks, and also connect with this group of traumatised children in the first place.
Over the next days, my colleague John Stanton and I will write a number of blog posts in order to celebrate this 80th Anniversary. We will describe some of the key events that occurred in Carrolup, highlighting a variety of achievements of the Carrolup children, as well as those of Noel and his wife Lilly, and other non-Aboriginal people who ‘walked alongside’ the children. We will provide various links to our past blog posts.
We will include the words of some of the children, taken from their letters, as well as from other people, including Noel’s daughter Noelene White who John Stanton has known from the mid-1980s. I spent a good deal of time with Noelene from the time we first met in 2016 until she passed away in June 2023. I also include a description of the situation and events written for my eBook, Connection: Aboriginal Child Artists Captivate Europe.
Noel White became the teacher at Carrolup school after the children’s first teacher, Mrs Olive Elliot, left in early 1946. She had earlier encouraged Noel to take over her role as teacher. Revel Cooper, one of the best known Carrolup child artists wrote the following in his later recollections of Carrolup:
‘Thus for the first time in our life we were going to have a man teacher, and I can assure you that we didn’t like it and we dreaded the arrival of this stranger. Then started the questions. Who was he? What was he like? Was he allowed to cane you? and countless other questions.’
The situation at Carrolup in those early days is described in my eBook:
‘Noel heads off to the school for his first day, dressed in his usual way, in a suit and tie. He rings the school bell and some of the children come running. Of the others, there is no sign. He rings the bell again… and then again. It takes him some time to assemble what he thinks might be all his pupils. He looks at the assembled children, many of them ‘little waifs, filthy dirty and their clothes just rags.’ They have no shoes and no jumpers to protect them against the cold of winter. Their hair looks as if it hasn’t been cut in years.
It takes a good deal of time for Noel to assemble the children on each of his first mornings at the school. When he is finally successful each day, he has them line up and then walk-marches them into the classroom—”about turn, left right, left right…” Once in the classroom, the children sit sullenly and silently at their desks and refuse to look at their teacher. They do not respond to his best efforts to get them to interact. Revel Cooper wrote of the situation:
‘The first week at school with our new teacher we were all scared stiff. I think if it wasn’t for the ever present smile of Mr Whites we would have all stormed out of the school and ran for our lives.’
You may find the following blog post of interest:
> Running Wild – Revel Cooper’s Memories of Carrolup
You can read a summary of the story in my article for the Western Australian Historical Society which appeared in their annual journal Early Days.
Details of my eBook Connection: Aboriginal Child Artists Captivate Europe can be found here.
Page of Revel Cooper reflections on Carrolup, 1960. Mary Durack Miller Collection, J.S. Battye Library of West Australian History.