Design and Art Australia Online

Aboriginal shellworkers lived in the Aboriginal settlement at La Perouse, on the shores of Botany Bay, from the 1890s to the 1950s. The first references to Aboriginal women selling shell baskets at Circular Quay and at La Perouse appear in the 1880s. By the turn of the century shell work by “Queen Emma” [Timbery] at the Aboriginal camp at La Perouse was admired when exhibited locally and overseas through mission organisations. Olive and Jane Simms were sisters, grandchildren of Queen Emma. They came from an Aboriginal family at La Perouse renowned for their artefact skills. The men worked wood into boomerangs and the women made shellwork for the passing Sydney tourist trade which still dominates the area at weekends.

The sisters’ lives were shaped entirely by La Perouse at the turn of the century when the reserve at the mouth of Botany Bay was opened up (in 1905) as a 'recreational area’ accessible by the Sydney tram. Despite the regular traffic of outsiders, the daily life of the Aboriginal community was governed by the state and mediated by the church, in the form of the United Aboriginal Mission. Like other missions located in sites with regular tourists contact such as Hermannsburg and Corranderk, artefact production was conceived as a means of providing some form of economic base. The Methodist missionaries had formerly worked in Fiji and appear to have seen the potential for adapting South Pacific shellwork locally. Collecting shellfish had always been central to coastal people, but this 'La Per shellwork’ does not resemble any precontact form. Its shapes are an adaptation of European souvenirs: little boxes in shapes of hearts, miniature shoes, Sydney Harbour Bridges, all made from scrap cardboard, cut, sewn and pasted together with a flour glue and then shelled.

A photograph showing Jane Simms holding a shellwork horseshoe and boomerang she had made appeared in the mission’s monthly newsletter in 1929, accompanying an article on La Perouse by Methodist missionary James Jago. Jago was temporarily serving at the La Perouse station while Miss Baker, the missionary who had worked there for twenty-four years, was taking a 'well-earned’ three-month holiday. Already despairing of the moral well-being of the majority of his temporary charges, Jago noted: 'Neither is it easy for our people to be Christians here, as we know what close touch with our civilization means to them… The work goes on … there are the faithful few who daily attend morning prayers… Miss Jane Simms, the seller of shellwork, is one of these prayer helpers. '

When shellwork is spoken about, it is always represented as a social and female process: 'When we were young our mothers would take us to the beach to collect shells. We would walk along the shoreline after the tide went down to collect shells that were not broken and shell grit. The women would sit around in a circle and sort the shells into sizes and colours. The different shells they used were muttonfish, starries, beachies, buttonies, cowrie, pearl, fan, conk, small cockle and small pippies. '

Two of Olive and Jane Simms’ nieces, Jean Stewart and Margie Dixon, remember their aunts’ dedication, professionalism and expertise in their art. Jean Stewart, recalled combing the beaches of 'La Per’, Maroubra and Cronulla with her aunts to find the shells from which they made necklaces and pairs of miniature ornamental slippers. Margie Dixon, spoke about, 'Auntie Ollie every Saturday afternoon doing her shellwork, she liked to be on her own. She had her special designs that none else knew. Up to the 1950s she was doing it.’

Other living shellers from La Perouse who were also (still or again?) working in the 1990s include Lola Ryan and her sister, Mavis Longbottom (dead by 2001) and Rose Timbery and her sister Esme Timbery .

Virtually nothing has survived of Olive and Jane Simms’s shellwork, only their reputation as some of the best 'shellers’ from the Aboriginal community at La Perouse. It is not surprising that their work only exists as a memory for it was made to be sold to white tourists and was not collected by museums, then interested only in 'authentic’ Aboriginal objects. What therefore can be retrieved of this hybrid, post-contact practice, and what values does it hold for both the local Aboriginal community and for the wider community who bought it as souvenirs?

Writers:

Stephen, Ann

Date written:

1995

Last updated: