Artists Gordon and Elaine Syron said RWA CEO, Robert Domm,
had requested they bring their collection of almost 1400 art works and
historical items to a warehouse at Eveleigh rail yards for cataloguing before
an appropriate space to house and display the collection was found nearby.
The collection includes Mr Syron’s most famous work,
Judgement of His Peers, for which he was recently offered $1.5 million. The RWA
was paying the Syrons for the cataloguing work and allowing them to live at the
warehouse site where the collection was stored.
According to the Syrons, misunderstandings with RWA staff
over professional assistance about how to catalogue the works had resulted in
only 90 per cent of the work being completed by the deadline of June 30.
“Robert Domm said we were going to be here for 12 months,
then he moved us to another building,” Mr Syron said. “He was going
to buy the collection and help us find a place where it would be preserved and
displayed.”
Mr Syron said he and his wife were now facing eviction from
the North Eveleigh site and the loss of the
collection. “The whole point of coming here and doing all this work was so
we could preserve this collection in an indigenous art centre for the future,
selling this is the last thing we want to do,” Mr Syron said.
Elaine Syron said the couple had been led to believe
professional expertise in archiving and cataloguing works would be offered and
said there had been a miscommunication.
“We had a contract to make a catalogue of the art works, but we are artists, not curators, we needed
expertise just to speed things up,” she said.
Mr Domm rejected the Syrons’ version of events, saying the
RWA had gone to considerable lengths to accommodate the couple and had already
extended their deadline by three months in the past.
“The RWA offered to assist as the project was
consistent with our plan to establish an Aboriginal Cultural Centre. It was
always made clear that the accommodation they were provided at North Eveleigh as part of their employment was only
short-term,” he said.
Source: Central 13th August 2008.