Julie Gough,Some Tasmanian Aboriginal children living with non-Aboriginal people before 1840  Pictured above and with detail. 2008, Found chair with burnt tea tree sticks. Installed approx: 288 x 60 x 50 cm, Collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Images by Jack Bett. Image and statement shared here with permission of the artist Julie Gough. 

 

ARTIST STATEMENT: 

This artwork contains part of  me and my family. We come from Aboriginal people removed from Country and family in VDL in the early 1800s. This isolation is a difficult feeling to represent. It is also difficult to overcome in terms of reuniting with other Aboriginal families and communities who were not separated from each other. 

 

Lately it is becoming more bearable by renegotiating those times to try to find what happened to all of the missing Aboriginal children who were living with non Aboriginal people in Tasmania up to 1840. I have a list of 209 children, including one of my Ancestors and her two sisters, compiled over the past decade. I am now trying to piece together their lives, their locations, their longevity. Some of these children are perpetually aged 10 and I fear that they did never grow up, others over the time of  research have grown up, moved to other parts of Australia and raised families, only in the last generation communicating back to us in Tasmania about what happened to them since the 1820s.

 

This artwork consists of unfinished tea-tree ‘spears’ held within the framework of an old chair, whose legs are burnt. The chair is fastened, uncannily, half way up a wall-face. The chair holds the children captive, but together, united. The chair might represent home for some, but is here performing an unnatural act, almost lion taming in its desperate rendition of domestication, of control.

 

When Aboriginal children and women were taken in the first 30 years post colonisation of VDL family, parents returned to burn stockkeeper’s huts. Fire was the weapon, the marker of fury and retribution. Things did not end well. These spears are raw tea tree sticks, they are not scraped of bark, their ends are not burnt nor honed to a fine point. They are not mature, but they promise that possibility. They are the children in the promise of becoming.

 

These spears each have a section peeled away to reveal the bare wood into each of which I have burnt the name of one of these lost children. This work holds the names of about one-third of the children I am seeking. Little is recorded about them, more is traceable about where they lived and who they lived with. 

 

Current work of mapping their locations and dates provides some little comfort in realising that although these children were far from family and Country, they were often mile after mile after mile in proximity to each other, of adjacent ‘properties’. So perhaps then they had contact with each other at least. The unofficial underground network of news-bringing across colonial Tasmania, by which convicts, stockmen, sealers passed information may have also been accessed by and for these children. I have some evidence for this and seek more.