Carrolup Child Artists: Arthur Bropho, Alma Cuttabut, Parnell Dempster, Phillip Jackson, Gregory Kelly, Edie Wallam, and five once known child artists (Australia)

Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney

As part of Western Australia’s assimilation policies in the 1940s, Aboriginal children from across the State were forcibly removed from their families and detained against their will at the Carrolup Native Settlement in remote bushland south of Perth. Soon after Noel White was appointed Carrolup’s headmaster and teacher in 1946, the children were all invited to respond to their natural surroundings through drawing. In little over four years the children produced many hundreds of distinctive artworks that were widely exhibited in Australia and across the UK until such time as the State decided to close the Settlement and School in 1950. Only a handful of child artists are known – making the sharing of this story so important to discover more artists names to connect their living descendants with these artworks.