Clothilde Bullen

Kylie Kwong celebrates the individuals helping to grow a stronger community. This month, we meet Wardandi (Nyoongar) and Badimaya (Yamatji) Aboriginal woman Clothilde Bullen OAM, the manager of Art, Culture and Collections at Edith Cowan University and chair of the board of The National Association for the Visual Arts.

- ALEXANDRA CARLTON & KYLIE KWONG

CLOTHILDE BULLEN OAM HAS ALWAYS HAD a deep - and personal - understanding of the kinship between Aboriginal Australians and Asian-Australians. She grew up in an outer area of Perth known - often derisively - as “KGB”, after the suburbs of Koondoola, Ghiraween and Balga, where both groups were strongly represented. “It was all social housing, blackfellas and Asian delis because the Asian-Australian mob were pushed to the fringes like us,” she remembers. “We had no money, but it was an amazing community to grow up in.” There was historically a lot of intermarrying - in fact, the father of Bullen’s two children is Aboriginal and Burmese - because the various communities tended to share common values around family, ritual and food.

It was this context that helped Bullen curate one of her most cherished current projects: an exhibit called