In one of Noongar artist Sandra Hill's most striking paintings, a group of white women make a cake as an Aboriginal woman looks on.
Hill told RN's The Art Show that the painting was inspired by events from her childhood, which she spent with a white foster family after she and her sister were forcibly removed from their mother.
"My foster mother would never let me and my sister help to make the cake," she recalls.
"I used to wonder about it because my white cousins … could make the cake, and they were there, lined up and licking the bowl and whisking the eggs, and I'd be sitting at the bench watching this happen."
WARNING: This article contains graphic content that may be confronting for some readers.
Years later, she confronted her white foster mother about this memory.
Ashamed and sorry, she told Hill: "I didn't want you making the cake because you had dark skin … I thought you were too dirty or too grubby to help make the cake."
"I was gobsmacked, it killed me, it still upsets me thinking about it … I had to move towards some sort of healing," Hill says.
So Hill — a mixed-media artist who has worked across painting, printing, collage, sculpture, installation and public art — painted The Cakemaker.
"Going through that process of getting that story out of the way, it's almost immunising me a little bit from it," Hill says.
That painting was recently on display in Mia Kurrum Maun (Far from Home), an exhibition of Hill's work at Perth's John Curtin Gallery.
Storytelling through art
"We were told by the welfare that our mother didn't want us and that she left us in the bush under a piece of tin," Hill says.
Later in life, she learned that in 1958, she and her three siblings were forcibly taken from their mother and their home in Point Samson in Western Australia's Pilbara region. Hill was just six and a half years old at the time.
Hill is the third generation of her family — who are from the Wardandi, Minang, Pibulmun, Ballardong and Wilmen clans — to be removed and placed in an institution.
They were taken to Sister Kate's children's home for "half-caste" children — an infamously cruel place where Hill experienced violence, abuse and neglect.
Hill was there for three years before she began living with her foster family. Eventually, her older sister Barbara joined her there.
"I harboured such hatred and such angst, stress, pain and grief when I was a child and as a young woman, [so] I used to use humour as a foil to cover my pain," Hill says.
But at her foster family's home, she would also often find herself drawing an angel, inspired by a print she saw in the church at Sister Kate's.
"That whole environment was just so disgusting that she was the only thing that was beautiful," Hill recalls.
By age 16, she had turned to art in earnest and she ended up completing an Advanced Diploma in Art Studies at Perth's Swan TAFE in 1981.
That angel became an image she returned to throughout her award-winning career as an artist and educator.
"If I couldn't have the healing process of telling my stories through art, I can't even imagine where I would be today and what condition I'd be in," she says.
Different shades
In 1985, 27 years after being taken, Hill was reunited with her mother, who told her about the years she had spent as a maidservant in the homes of white people.
"She never felt like she belonged, she always felt a sense of alienation, a sense of isolation and a sense of unacceptance from the white people around her," Hill recalls.
"I could relate to it because I felt the same thing. Not at the level she did but … everyone knew I was Aboriginal and they kind of looked down at me."
Building off a previous self-portrait, and inspired by her mother's experiences, she painted the "Home-maker" series (which includes The Cakemaker).
Each painting in the series depicts an Aboriginal woman in a bookah (kangaroo-skin cloak) in a brightly-coloured domestic setting. In contrast, the white people of the Home-maker series are rendered in grey tones.
Hill's mother and aunty had been at the Moore River Native Settlement when AO Neville, Western Australia's notorious Chief Protector of Aborigines, visited to examine their skin.
Lighter-skinned Aboriginal children, like Hill's mother and aunty, were then sent to Sister Kate's children's home (with the mission to "breed out the black") — the same orphanage Hill was later sent to.
"So the grading that he [Neville] was doing to determine the colour level of an Aboriginal child, I put that back on the white people by making them different shades of grey," the artist explains.
Reconnecting with country
Hill is now a Wardandi elder and custodian and she lives in Balingup, a small village in Wardandi country.
She is a board member of Wardandi's Undalup association which, for the last four years, has been trying to establish the first gallery and education centre dedicated exclusively to south-west Western Australian Aboriginal art.
"If we don't do something in the very near future, we're going to lose a generation of our young people because they're not going to have a pathway to move towards," says the artist.
Hill is hoping to train Noongar artists in "mainstream arts" — teaching them about everything from funding applications to materials.
"[But] I like to think that we're going to create a movement which will be an Aboriginal arts movement with Aboriginal rules and Aboriginal parameters," she says.
A key part of her vision for the centre is connecting students with their country, which in south-west Western Australia encompasses 14 different language groups.
"This is part of what the Stolen Generation has taken … away from our people, especially here in the south-west, because it was so ravenous."
"I went on a journey, a very long journey. Most of my life I've been fighting my way back and trying to find out who I am, where I am. And I know how hard it was … [because] I had few people to guide me," she says.
As elders pass away, Hill says, there's an urgency to reconnecting stolen children with their descendants.
"We're losing knowledge and information that they carry and it needs to be documented — and we could do that through art."
A beacon
"I'm still here and so many other Stolen Generation people are still here. It's living history and that's what people don't understand. They think it happened in the past. It didn't, it happened to me and I'm still alive," Hill says.
"It's still happening. Our kids are still being taken away and put in juvenile detention centres. So it hasn't stopped. It'll never stop until people stop and listen."
For the last 25 years, Hill has been making public art (with collaborator Jenny Dawson) and she was recently commissioned to make a new public artwork acknowledging the Stolen Generations, for Perth's Wellington Square.
"We have nothing in Perth that tells that story … We need this place, we need it so badly, we've needed it for a long time, and we will take ownership of it."
She says the work is going to consist of five traditional dwellings, or mia-mias, and that it will serve as a place for Aboriginal people to come together and tell their stories.
"It's going to be something tangible that we can hang on to," Hill says.
The design also includes lights that will make the mia-mias glow like a campfire at night.
"It's a beacon to help Stolen Generation people find their way home."
Hill says this will be one of her final pieces of public art and that she has hope in the future of Aboriginal people despite the challenges.
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMiYGh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIwLTA2LTAzL3N0b2xlbi1nZW5lcmF0aW9ucy1hYm9yaWdpbmFsLWFydGlzdC1zYW5kcmEtaGlsbC8xMjMxMTYyNNIBJ2h0dHBzOi8vYW1wLmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvYXJ0aWNsZS8xMjMxMTYyNA?oc=5
2020-06-02 22:46:11Z
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