THE PAINTINGS OF SHEILA
WORDS kent rosenthal sj
For Sheila Humphries, painting is a way of telling stories and trying to bridge the gap with a past that is yet to be fully understood.
The paintings of Sheila, artist-in-residence at the West Australian monastic town of New Norcia, reflect her experience as a child growing up in St Joseph’s Orphanage for aboriginal girls in the 1940s and 50s.
Sheila sees that art, like religion, is about making a link with the past in order to find a way of looking at the present. Many historians, journalists and documentary-makers have visited Sheila’s hometown to try to tell its story. In 1846, a group of Spanish Benedictine monks arrived to set up a monastery to ‘civilise and evangelise’ the native people. New Norcia, 130km north of Perth, was one of the earliest missions to the aborigines of Western Australia.
The schools for European-descent Australians and the orphanages for aboriginal children have long closed, but New Norcia is still home to over a dozen monks and around 70 lay people who work either at the sheep property, education centre, guest houses, bakery, pub, museum or other businesses. A recent attempt to make a documentary by interviewing some of the former residents of the aboriginal orphanages has stirred division in the town and added to confusion over the town’s past.
Abbot
Placid Spearritt (right) says he was disappointed by the documentary
The Habits of New Norcia which aired on SBS in 2000. ‘Particularly
because they were in a hurry to make it, and in my opinion were clearly
not going to do enough research to justify their conclusions. And in fact
we got complaints from some of the people they interviewed that they had
cut out all the good bits they had to say about the mission.’
The disappointment of this one-sided depiction spurred Sheila’s
sister, May Taylor (also a former resident of the aboriginal girls’
orphanage) to sell her house to pay for flights for three of the Benedictine
sisters to visit. One came from Spain, one from Jamberoo Abbey in New
South Wales and one from the Kimberley.
Both Sheila and May speak fondly of the Benedictine sisters, but Sheila
doesn’t deny that there were tough times. Sheila’s mother placed
her in the orphanage in 1944 when she was nine. ‘When I was nine
she wanted us to get a better education.’
Sheila’s mother later decided to take her children out of the orphanage. ‘She stood at the door and begged us to go with her—and I just got up and we ran from that classroom. We ran out to her and we were with her for three months and then the welfare put out a state of alert for the police to apprehend and arrest us on sight. We were brought back by the police … handcuffed in the train because they wanted to get out and pick some flowers when the train stopped.’
Although Sheila and her five sisters and brother were placed in the orphanage by their parents, Sheila says a heavy-handed welfare system and tough living conditions made it difficult for aboriginal children to stay at home. ‘You were either placed in, or taken away—but the way aboriginal people dealt with it was for them to place their children in the home, that way they didn’t become the welfare’s property.’
As well as being New Norcia’s artist-in-residence, Sheila gives talks to schools and other groups visiting the town’s education centre. She tells her story and gives workshops on the techniques and symbols of aboriginal art. Many of Sheila’s paintings are a combination of aboriginal and European styles. She uses European landscape style alongside aboriginal symbols so that the meanings of the symbols are more easily recognised.
When people say they prefer her to paint in aboriginal style, Sheila replies: ‘But who’s going to be standing there forever telling you what this is and what that is? I can’t, you know, so I paint like this so they can see the hills and the trees and the flowers and the birds.’
In October this year Sheila will visit the Vatican and present one of her paintings at an audience with the Pope. She will then give the painting to the Benedictine sisters in Spain who taught her. The painting will be similar to the one in New Norcia’s museum (pictured with this article) depicting her childhood with the sisters.
‘The big blue dots around the outside are the rosary that we said
every day. The circles are where we went for walks and picnics all around
here … and the rivers. There are the flowers that we picked …
everlastings, kangaroo paws, wattles …. the ducks, the yabbies and
the goannas that we fed the nuns with’, she chuckles. ‘The nuns
used to say: "Can I have the leg?"—we used to take ‘em
bush.’
Sheila signs her paintings Wadgee, which was her maternal grandmother’s
surname. ‘It’s an aboriginal name from the Pilbara, and the
meaning of it is beautiful. I use the name in the hope that someone will
see it and make that connection with my grandmother’s family.’
Sheila has used painting and writing as a jumping-off point that allows her to engage with the perennial questions of life.
‘It’s been a long journey—a very hard one. I used to be really full of hate towards people. But I learned to cope—learned to get over that—and saw for myself, after writing, that I was the one being hurt and not the people I was putting my anger towards. And I had a wonderful Christian husband who taught me differently—how to forgive—he was a wonderful person.’
Reflecting on aboriginal-white reconciliation, Sheila says the way forward involves seeing past skin colour and looking at the inner person. ‘It’s easy to say we want the white people to reconcile with us, but we’ve also got to reconcile with them. It has to come from both sides.’
Abbot Placid Spearritt sees the way forward in further systematic and intelligent study of the monastery archives, artefacts and photographs.
‘The developments that we are doing in the education centre and the setting up of the St Joseph’s (orphanage) exhibition I think are a major step forward, and of course they’ve both been done with full collaboration with the aboriginal community here.
‘Gradually I’m trying to set up a critical, scholarly assessment of the history of New Norcia. But there’s a long way to go. But that’s important to me—that we get some serious scholarship instead of just pious hagiography and romantic journalism.’
And Sheila will keep telling her story of New Norcia too—through her paintings, through teaching painting techniques and through talking to visitors at the education centre.
For more information see the New Norcia website.
Photographs curtesy of New Norcia.
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