24 A report on the exhibition ‘Children, Boats and “Hidden Histories”: Crayon drawings by Aboriginal children at Point Pearce Mission (Burgiyana) (South Australia), 1939’ Amy Roberts 1 Department of Archaeology, Flinders University, GPO 2100, ADELAIDE, South Australia 5001 Email: amy.roberts@linders.edu.au Madeline Fowler Department of Archaeology, Flinders University, GPO 2100, ADELAIDE, South Australia 5001 Email: maddy.fowler@linders.edu.au Tauto Sansbury Narungga Aboriginal Corporation Regional Authority/Narungga Nation Aboriginal Corporation Email: garridja@adam.com.au 1 Author for correspondence Introduction This paper reports on a recent exhibition ‘Children, Boats and ‘Hidden Histories’: Crayon drawings by Aboriginal children at Point Pearce Mission (Burgiyana) (South Australia [SA]), 1939’. The exhibit was displayed in the South Australian Maritime Museum (1 Feb–31 July 2014) and was curated by Roberts, Fowler and Sansbury (Fig.1). The exhibition featured nine framed crayon drawings (facsimiles) as well as a large interpretive panel. The drawings were collected in 1939 by Dorothy Tindale and Bee Birdsell at the Point Pearce Aboriginal Mission (Burgiyana) in South Australia. These artworks form just one component of a much larger assemblage of information and objects collected during the Board for Anthropological Research’s Harvard and Adelaide Universities’ Anthropological Expedition (1938–9) (see South Australian Museum [2014] for more information about the Board’s activities as well as sections below). A total of 91 crayon drawings were collected from the children at Point Pearce (Burgiyana). However, in this exhibition pictures with a maritime theme were selected in order to highlight the maritime achievements of Narungga people that have historically been downplayed in Western literature. Highlighting such achievements more broadly and publicly is seen as important by the community. The majority of drawings that feature ships and boats were drawn by boys at Point Pearce (Burgiyana), with girls often choosing to depict other subjects such as lowers and houses. Ships and boats illustrated in the exhibition include: a two-masted fore-and-aft ketch, three-masted ships, a three-masted full-rigged ship, a two-masted fore-and-aft schooner, a single-masted gaff-rigged cutter, fore-and-aft schooners, steamships and other unidentiiable vessels. Such a collection is highly signiicant as children’s experiences on missions are often silenced in historical documents. These silences challenge contemporary researchers to seek to redress this imbalance and to consider the ways in which children’s voices and experiences can be privileged. The exhibition of these Bulletin of the Australasian Institute for Maritime Archaeology (2014), 38: 24–30 Figure 1. Exhibition installation (Courtesy of the South Australian Maritime Museum and Adam Paterson, Photo: J. Bateman). Figure 2. Example of one of the drawings displayed in the exhibition. Fred Graham, ‘Red, white, yellow, blue, orange and brown drawing of two boats on water and an apple’ (2 March 1939, grade 2, aged 6 years, crayon on paper, 36 x 53.5 cm) (AA346/18/9/14, South Australian Museum Archives).