Truth Telling: Our Past, Present and Future

Kinchela Boys Home is very excited to announce the opening of a new Coolamon art exhibition.  This exhibition coincides with a launch of the new KBH Coolamon website.

Truth-Telling: Our Past, Present and Future is the inaugural exhibition of Kinchela Boys Home Aboriginal Corporation’s Coolamon Arts Hub showcasing works created by Kinchela Boys Home (KBH) Survivors.

Bradley Webb, KBH Descendant and Curator of this exhibition, says “it fittingly represents the KBH Survivors from their artworks to their portraits in which their faces tell a story that is important that we listen to.”

In Truth Telling: Our Past, Present and Future, KBH Survivors share their experience of KBH, the legacies it has left on their lives, their journey to reunite with family and reclaim their cultures.

The exhibition will feature artwork and stories from these talented artists:

🖌️ Uncle Richard P Campbell

🖌️ Uncle Roger Garrett

🖌️ Uncle Colin Davis

🖌️ Uncle Robert ‘Bobby’ Young

🖌️ … and more!!

The exhibition also features Noongar and Spinifex visual storyteller, Tace Stevens, photographic collaboration with some of the KBH Survivors titled We Were Just Little Boys.

Stevens created a body of work, that is a series of juxtapositions. Lies and truth. Past and present. Little boys and old men. Photos of the Kinchela Boys were constantly used as propaganda to show Australia Kinchela was a good place, achieving what it had set out to do – “turning out clean and healthy boys, who will develop into useful citizens,” as written by the Macleay Argus in 1943. The Uncles didn’t have any autonomy, voice, or power when they were at Kinchela. This body of work is a reclamation of their truth. Within this series, the KBH Survivors confront the camera, and by extension, us, to share their truth.

In the words of Truth Telling: Our Past, Present and Future curator, Bradley Webb, “art is a healing and connection to culture. A continuation of our oral tradition of storytelling.”