Grit and tenacity:
Warragul artist and Kurnai elder Eileen Harrison was awarded an honorary doctorate by Federation University last week with her citation acknowledging her good heart, grit and tenacity.. At the ceremony is Dr Eileen Harrison, right, Federation University’s Aboriginal Education Centre manager Bonnie Chew, and Dr Harry Ballis, from the Gippsland Campus.
Warragul artist and Kurnai elder Eileen Harrison has been awarded an honorary doctorate by Federation University.
Dr Harrison received her degree during the university’s graduation ceremony at the Gippsland campus in Churchill last Thursday.
She said it was a proud moment accepting her doctorate in front of friends and family.
“I’ve never achieved anything like that or seen myself in a cap and gown. I was quite emotional.”
Dr Harrison has had a long and close association with the university’s Churchill campus. Last year she was artist in residence at the Gippsland Centre for Art and Design and the university also featured an exhibition of her works entitled Listening to the Old Ones in the Trees.
Her citation for the Degree of Doctor of the University states: “Aunty Eileen Harrison, Kurnai Elder, artist, epitome of courage and insight, inspires us by who she is and in doing so shows us the very best of ourselves.
“We wish to recognise her good heart. We wish to acknowledge her grit and tenacity. We wish to learn from her resolve in confronting the challenges of ‘racism, dispossession and deafness’.
“We wish to commend her art and her book and her possum cloak for the responsible and insightful ways in which they teach us about her people, her culture, her land and herself.
“Above all, we wish to celebrate the life of Eileen Harrison, who through her humility and sensibility and grace inspires us all.”
Of Gunai/Kurnai descent, Dr Harrison was born at Bungyarnda (Lake Tyers) Mission, where she lived until the age of 13 with her large extended family: her parents, 10 siblings, grandparents, uncles, aunties and cousins.
She has lots of happy memories, “sitting by the huge fire out in the dark, stars in the sky, listening to stories about the Doolagahs and Narguns, Mrarts, all those myths and legends”.
All that ended in the 1950s when the family was forcefully removed from the station under a government policy of assimilation. Eileen left school at 14 as the family disintegrated around her.
It wasn’t until she was in her early fifties that she began to put her life together again and returned to studying. As a child, she had loved painting and she took it up again.
She received the NAIDOC award for Artist of the Year in 2004 and the RMF Recognition for Artistic and Cultural Heritage Award in 2007, and has two paintings hanging in the Queen’s Hall at the Victorian Parliament.
She draws on her Kurnai heritage as inspiration for her work, focusing on the use of lines, patterns and vibrant colours to bring out delicate and intricate designs in bold images.
Her paintings now hang in many private and public collections, including Victoria’s Parliament House and Melbourne Museum’s Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre.
Dr Harrison’s sometimes tragic but ultimately inspiring life story, Black Swan, A Koorie Woman’s Life, which she co-wrote with former Warragul author Carolyn Landon, was published to great acclaim in 2011.
She said then that working on the book was a sometimes painful process that helped her understand what had happened to her family and herself under the government policy of assimilation.