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History colors Aboriginal artist's life: Mural in East Atlanta reflects Australia's racist past

By Shelia M. Poole

17 March 2004 - For years, Australian artist Pamela Croft was told to hide her Aboriginal heritage.

She felt the white world — the world of her adoptive parents — hated that part of her. Her adoptive mother would call her derogatory names. Her adoptive father wanted her to use the Lord's word to lift her birth mother and other Aboriginals "from the depths of sin."

Today, Croft has learned to embrace the duality of her cultures — Aboriginal and Western.

"It was a difficult journey for all of us," said Croft, who recently spearheaded an effort to paint a mural in East Atlanta that draws heavily on symbolism from Aboriginal culture and her Kooma clan.

She's titled the 20-foot-tall, 100-foot-wide mural "Bringing Nations, Cultures and Communities Together" and thinks it might be the largest example of Aboriginal art in the world.

Handprints represent connecting the human spirit with that of Mother Earth. Blue lines symbolize rivers. A map of Australia is painted in the Aboriginal colors of red, black and yellow. And there's the wildlife of Australia — a kangaroo, goanna lizard, emu and platypus.

She said she did the mural, on the side of the Australian Bakery Cafe on Flat Shoals Avenue, as a way to thank Atlanta for being so good to her son, David, who has lived in the metro area for five years, and to give the Australian community here an ambience of home.

"Symbols identify who you are," said Croft, 49. "It shows you belong to a place. I did it for my future generations."

The future wasn't so certain a few decades ago. Croft is part of the "stolen generation." From 1870 to 1970, Australia's government instituted a policy to erase Aboriginal culture. An estimated 100,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were forcibly removed from their homes and adopted by white families or sent to orphanages.

The plan called for the "blackness" to be bred out of Aboriginal people, having them fully assimilated into the white community. Even now, the victims of the forced removals report problems associated with the trauma of losing touch with their family, culture and language.

Croft has her own version of that experience. For two years, the government tried to take Croft from her mixed-race mother — a waitress — and place her with a white adoptive family. Each time, her mother fought back, until Croft was 6 years old, at which point she gave in on the condition that she could have yearly visits — for a few hours each time — and could write and call Croft.

Croft lived with the family for about a dozen years before she married a white swimming pool cleaner turned salesman. She said she was a victim of domestic violence, but it took years to leave her husband because she was determined not to separate her family.

Today, she still finds herself rebuilding those lost years, and she's doing it partly though art.

Her abstract paintings and sculptures, on display in Atlanta, Cobb County and Macon, deal with issues of identity and displacement.

"I couldn't find my voice for so many years," she said. "This is my way of talking."

Croft's work has graced the National Museum of Australia, several regional galleries in the United States and private collections. Last year she earned a doctorate in visual arts.

When she looks back on those years of separation from her mother and the discrimination she encountered, Croft said some inner strength enabled her to survive. She went though a healing process that helped her deal with the trauma and her anger.

"The Aboriginal spirit is still strong," she said. "A lot of people still can't comprehend that this is part of history."

Several years ago, she bought a 100-acre ranch in central Queensland state in Australia, where she lives with her partner, Mark; her other son, Timothy; and her biological mother and stepfather. They plan to turn part of the land into a site for ecotourism.

"Our time is now," Croft said, explaining her decision to share her space with her mother. "We're both on a healing journey."

THE 'STOLEN GENERATION'

• 1937: Aboriginal people "not of full blood" are required to be assimilated into the wider population. The government sets up separate education facilities for Aboriginal children, mandates state guardianship of all Aboriginal children, places Aborigines in special reserves, and forcibly removes indigenous children from their families.

• 1967: In a constitutional referendum, the national government is empowered to make laws on Aboriginal affairs, which were previously the responsibility of the states (except for the Northern Territory).

• 1995: The government convenes a national inquiry into the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from their homes and their transfer to the custody of white families between 1870 and 1970. The report concludes that over the course of a century, the government had knowingly pursued a policy of genocide in regard to the Aboriginal peoples.

• 1997: The "Bringing Them Home Report" reveals the extent of forced removal and its consequences.

• 1999: On May 26, Australia holds its first "Sorry Day." The country reflects on an aspect of its past it would sooner forget.

• 2000: Aboriginal athlete and eventual 400 meters gold medalist Cathy Freeman represents Australia in the Sydney Olympics.

• 2001: The Australian census lists 410,000 of its 18,769,249 population as being "Indigenous." Of that number, 366,429 are listed as "Aboriginal."

— Sources: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2001 census. Staff research by JONI ZECCOLA

Source: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

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