Vera Wallam b. c.1934

embroiderer. Along with fellow students, designed and worked tapestries for cushion and chair covers 'in startling colours'. Many given to the Red Cross during WWII.
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embroiderer, was a Nyungar from south-west WA. In the late 1940s she attended the school at what was then known as Carrolup Native Settlement (today’s Marribank), near Katanning, when Noel and Lily White were the teachers and artmaking was encouraged. The boys’ pastel landscape drawings are better known but the girls were also prolific artists, creating a wide variety of abstract designs. The Education Department of the day encouraged the boys’ art in the expectation that at least a few of them might later find employment as commercial artists; the girls, however, were being trained as domestic servants and were guided away from art along a different path. They had always done embroidery. Mary Durack Miller and Florence Rutter state that during World War II 'they gave some lovely pieces of work to the Red Cross’. The designs they worked as tapestries for cushion and chair covers 'in startling colours’ after the boys’ drawings were unique and beautiful art works. However, all except Vera Wallam’s splendid cushion cover (c.1948) after a design by Revel Cooper (Berndt Museum, UWA) have now disappeared.

Writers:
Stanton, John E.
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011

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References [<ExternalResource: Mary Durack Miller with Florence Rutter (1952), 'Child Artists of the Australian Bush', Sydney, NSW.>, <ExternalResource: John E. Stanton (1992), 'Nyungar Landscapes: Aboriginal Artists of the South-West, the Heritage of Carrolup, Western Australia', Perth, WA.>]