Wildflowers Bloomed To Brighten Artist's Life

Sydney Morning Herald

Monday May 1, 2006

Judith Salmon

UNLIKE many members of the stolen generation, the artist Carmel Marie Nicholson maintained contact with her mother, Rosie. Once every couple of years, Rosie would visit Nicholson at the convent where she lived at Mitchelton, and Nicholson wrote to her mother every month. This contact later influenced the artist's paintings.

On rare occasions, Nicholson received small packages of wildflowers that Rosie had picked after the rains at Quilpie, in south-west Queensland. These flowers would dry out and wilt on their way to Mitchelton, but they were Nicholson's lifeline to her mother, and when she began painting, Quilpie wildflowers became a recurring metaphor for the love between mother and daughter.

She was born at Ray Station near Quilpie. She was the daughter of Rosie Dick, great-granddaughter of "Kangaroo", leader of the Buntamurra people and sole survivor of a police massacre at Cameron Corner at the beginning of the 20th century. Her father was an English stockman, David Nicholson.

For the first six years of her life, Nicholson lived with her mother at Ray Station, where Rosie worked for a family by the name of Tully. Nicholson remembered fishing and picking wildflowers along the creek with her mother and in later years these memories would inspire an output of joyous paintings.

At age six, Nicholson was forcibly removed from her mother and taken to Cherbourg Mission. Rosie followed her and mother and daughter remained at Cherbourg until they were released into the care of the Tullys. In a statement made by Nicholson at a ceremony organised by the Good Shepherd Sisters at Ashfield on National Sorry Day 1998, she referred to Cherbourg as a "prison" and recalled being frightened of the dark, having sores all over her body and her head shaved.

By the time mother and daughter were released from Cherbourg, Nicholson was seven years old. However, the Queensland Government's policy of removing children of mixed black and white descent had not altered, so when Rosie returned to Ray Station, Nicholson was placed firstly in the care of the Carmelites at Auchenflower and then with the Good Shepherd Sisters at their convent in Mitchelton. She would spend the next 56 years at Mitchelton.

During these years, Nicholson received a basic education and demonstrated talent for singing and playing the violin. She was taught music by teachers from the conservatorium, sang in the Brisbane City Choir and performed in amateur theatrical productions. At 14, she began working in the commercial laundry and later took over management of the Home for Girls kitchen. When the home closed, Nicholson moved into a sponsored house with friends from the convent where she remained until she moved to Sydney in 1992.

In 1996, Nicholson attended the Eora Aboriginal Art College in Chippendale and the next year was awarded a grant from the Australia Council for the Arts to develop her first exhibition. In preparation for this exhibition, Nicholson travelled to her birth county at Quilpie. It was her first visit since being taken away at the age of six. This experience was a highly emotional one for Nicholson and for some time afterwards she was unable to paint at all.

Her return to Quilpie coincided with a period of heavy rain - the country was a mass of wildflowers, like those she remembered picking with Rosie and those her mother had sent her at the convent. When Carmel began painting again she filled her boards and canvases with Quilpie wildflowers. In response to her first exhibition, Rosie's Story, in 1998, Ken Watson, then a curator at the Art Gallery of NSW, wrote: "Carmel uses her paint both sensuously and confidently. She has a direct and literal use of visual imagery which is obviously influenced by some of Australia's greatest desert painters."

Rosie's Story established Nicholson as a serious artist and was followed by two equally successful exhibitions: Buntamurra Dreaming, in 2000, and Eternal Echoes, in 2002. By 2002, however, Nicholson was suffering the effects of dementia. For the Eternal Echoes exhibition, she produced a series of beautiful paintings so full of life the wildflowers appeared to dance on the surface of the canvases. This was Nicholson's artistic triumph. The exhibition was officially opened by the Governor of NSW, Professor Marie Bashir, and during the course of the exhibition Nicholson was interviewed by Rachael Kohn for Radio National's The Spirit of Things.

In 1999, Nicholson was interviewed for the National Library's Bringing Them Home Oral History Project. Her interview and her painting Eternal Echoes are both featured in the final publication. In 2003, North Sydney Council invited Nicholson to exhibit her paintings in the Guringai Festival, A Celebration of Aboriginal Culture and Heritage; the council has subsequently acquired two of Nicholson's paintings for their civic art collection. It meant a great deal to Nicholson that she was accepted as an Aboriginal woman whose life experiences were considered valuable.

Nicholson's cheerful, loving nature and her positive disposition meant that in life she was surrounded by friends who loved her dearly and now miss her terribly. To us, her achievements seem outstanding, but Nicholson was a woman of deep and intuitive wisdom. On the occasion of the opening of her last exhibition, I asked her how she felt. She replied: "I'm happy. I have everything I want."

As was her wish, she rests with her mother at the Pinaroo cemetery in Brisbane.

Judith Salmon

© 2006 Sydney Morning Herald

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