Drawings and paintings by children from Hermannsburg, Aurukun and Malabunga

When Mrs Derham visited the Lutheran Mission at Hermannsburg in 1938 she found that the Aboriginal children, who spoke little English, kept their distance from a strange white woman. With patience, she was eventually able to win their confidence and they produced more than two hundred drawings for her. She describes how the children at first evaded her approaches:

At first I could not get in touch with the children. I’d sit painting or drawing, I would place a bag of sweets behind me in a sparsely grown piece of desert country. I would be absorbed in my work, I would look round and find the bag of sweets gone and yet there had been no sign of a child. They would have been following me, stalking me, until they could get some sweets, but without making any contact.

After she offered pastels and paper to ‘Clod’ (Claude) he began to draw and the other children followed his example with enthusiasm. Although they could sign their works in elegant copper-plate style the older boys were shy of writing their own signatures. They often signed ‘Claude’ or ‘Clod’ instead of their own names.

During her visit Mrs Derham was given permission to take eighty children to Palm Valley, about 24 km from the mission. When they arrived, she and Stanley, the camel boy, unloaded the pastels and paper from the camel she had ridden. The children took these materials and settled down among the rocks and bushes to spend the whole day drawing.

The boys drew pairs of animals, hunting scenes and landscapes while the girls preferred flower studies.

In fact they were the flowers of the Semco patterns which you could buy in every little store in Australia. The embroidery was usually done by Missions which taught women how to do lazy daisy and other simple stitches. The copying that the girls did was perfect. They thought a white woman would want white women’s art.

When pressed to do so, the girls could create lively and expressive animal studies and landscapes like those of the boys.

As Frankie communicated with the young artists by smiles and nods she could hardly be said to influence the choice of subject matter greatly. She said the boys liked to work alone, without copying or reference to each other’s work, and were extremely perceptive:

When I saw them drawing that aircraft, it had an extraordinary appearance. It was shaped rather like a boot. If I hadn’t see it land at Alice Springs I might have thought they’d invented it. In fact it was an exact representation of that plane which had gone from Alice Springs to Hermannsburg.

Today it can be seen that suppression of the expression of traditional Aboriginal culture at the mission, and the secret element in some art forms, resulted in the emergence of a new vehicle of expression at Hermannsburg. A transitional landscape style appeared which was not merely copied from the work of white Australian artists but was a reordered system of schemata depicting the central Australian environment. In the boys’ drawings, an elevation view with a strong horizon line is often combined with the repetition of shapes such as hills of decorative patterning of trees, rocks and plants. A Rainbow Serpent in plan view emerges from a Western-style landscape or a hunter with bound hair floats above an elevation view.

This transitional style emerged in the work of mission-educated children during the early 1930s. On to this again was grafted the Western-style watercolour technique acquired by Albert Namatjira from Rex Battarbee and later taught to several of his sons.

The early drawings of the Aboriginal boys at Hermannsburg provide important clues to the development of transitional art movements across central Australia and it is likely that future research on these drawings will add a new facet to the history of Australian art.

Mrs Derham maintained contact with the Hermannsburg Mission for many years and children's drawings were sent on to her, including a series of pen-and-ink sketches made by boys in 1950.

In 1948 Mrs Derham made the long journey to Aurukun Presbyterian Mission to visit Geraldine Mackenzie, who was preparing reading materials for Aboriginal children. She stayed for five weeks at Aurukun, where she found about three hundred children and their parents living in largely traditional circumstances. Believing that the Aboriginal people should be diverted as little as possible from their tribal life, the missionaries, Gerry and Bill Mackenzie, concentrated on the practical activities of providing food, building shelters and caring for the sick. Frankie joined in the routine life of the mission and worked enthusiastically with the children, who wore a minimum of clothing and learnt to hunt and collect food in traditional ways. School was conducted outdoors in the cool shade of huge almond trees that grew around the mission.

A shipment of art materials had been arranged to the mission but these were delayed en route for four weeks, so Frankie and the children stripped bark from paperbark trees (Melaleuca sp.) and prepared their own colours from ground ochres, clay and bootblack mixed with turpentine. From oil paint she extracted a pure blue pigment which was used with enthusiasm by the young artists because of its bright colour.

The children worked with equal facility on bark or paper, producing lively studies of animals and birds, cowboys, hunting scenes, and church services at the mission. The compositions are usually more crowded than those from Hermannsburg and mission scenes are characterized by rows of stylized figures dominated by the large pink form of Bill Mackenzie.

The preference for large areas and bands of colour and a broad rendering of animal and bird images is reminiscent of the traditional art style of this region. The vitality of the simply realized animal forms owes much to the expressive painted sculpture so characteristic to Aurukun.

Mrs Derham produced a number of drawings of Aboriginal people at the mission and the children were able to watch her sketching. The experience had a significant effect on their painting style, as she recalls:

At Aurukun I was told by Gerry Mackenzie in the 1950s that there was ‘pre-Frances Derham’ and ‘after-Frances Derham’ in their depictions. They saw me sketch only twice. However, it was enough for them to note that I painted the sky which had never been thought of as something they could paint. ‘Now’, said Gerry, ‘we have blue skies, thunderstorms, sunsets, the lot’.

The children at Aurukun, like children everywhere, were preoccupied with events in their daily lives. Two of them produced delightful studies of the evening meal, three large fish, being cooked by their mother over an open fire.

While Frankie was staying at the mission some of the fourteen-year-old boys went on their first pig hunt. This rather dangerous and highly exciting activity was illustrated by several children. At the successful completion of the hunt the whole mission celebrated with a huge feast.

As a result of the visit to Aurukun, a lifelong friendship developed between Frankie and Gerry Mackenzie, who often sent her examples of the children’s paintings.

During her first trip of five days to Papua New Guinea in 1960 Mrs Derham visited Port Moresby, where she met Lady Cleland (the wife of the Administrator, Sir Donald Cleland), who shared her interest in children’s creative expression. As a result, she was given the collection of drawings acquired by Lady Cleland on an official visit to Malabunga:

There is a small but interesting collection that was given to me by Lady Cleland, now Dame Rachel Cleland, who, every time she paid an official visit in PNG with her husband, gave out crayons and paper and asked that the children depict the things they knew.

This small group of drawings includes expressive and original statements of aspects of village life.

In 1967 Mrs Derham was invited to Rabaul to judge an art exhibition. To her concern, she found that the work of indigenous artists was not represented, but through Joan Meaker, who had been a teacher at Malabunga for some years, she was to acquire examples of students' work. Joan Meaker combined an affinity with her students and the local people with an antipathy toward formal art teaching which led to a non-directed work environment for the students.

She hated drawing and said she would never teach it. However she left the children free to draw about their own lives, their village, their trials and sometimes their dreams, which are often horrifying.

Certainly many of the works from Malabunga are influenced by the Australian art education practices and materials introduced into Papua New Guinea by the late 1960s. The use of 'ink-blot' techniques or pattern-making to create imagery are two characteristic examples. Oil pastel was widely used in schools as a drawing medium and in combination with gouache to achieve a range of effects.

While the use of materials and techniques is derivative, as is the depiction of introduced objects such as bicycles and cows, there is much that is indigenous. Some of the paintings show costumes and masks for traditional ceremonies, others show spirit figures or forests inhabited by mysterious animals or beings. The use of strong colour, particularly red and yellow, in broad areas is also characteristic of traditional art styles.

The painting of fire and initiation scenes had particular significance for boys at Malabunga. Their work represented fire-walking, where boys must run through the burning embers, and the snake images which are produced to evoke feelings of terror.

Unlike the imagery of the Aboriginal boys, which focused on the schematic representation of landscape, many of these drawings from Malabunga depict animal and tree spirits, or express elements of coercion and fear. The use of strong patterns and bright colour gives these works an ambivalence which is both attractive and disturbing.

Due to the vast size of Mrs Derham's collection its relocation from her Melbourne studio to the Gallery has taken several years. The cataloguing of some seven thousand paintings and drawings and the sorting of research material including hundreds of letters and photographs is continuing. When the whole collection is made accessible to researchers it will become an extremely important resource for students of art education in Australia.