IT WAS a cold, rainy spring day when I turned onto Easey Street in Collingwood. At number 47, a red-brick factory building stood weathered and unassuming, its surface marked by graffiti, torn posters, and the damp sheen of rain. The street was quiet, the façade giving little away. From the outside, there was nothing ceremonial, only the blunt presence of an old industrial wall. But stepping through the doors, the mood shifted. The raw exterior gave way to white walls and stillness. Inside, the exhibition We Were Just Little Boys — presented by the Centre for Contemporary Photography in partnership with Agency Projects — unfolded for the first time in full. In one corner, a table displayed the newly published photobook of the same name, produced by Tall Poppy Press, extending the work beyond the walls.
What greets the visitor at the entrance is a large print of a sprawling tree, its branches spreading wide across panels that wrap the corner wall. The canopy forms a dense weave of shadow and sky, anchoring the room with its weight. Beneath it, two small figures stand in the paddock, almost diminished by scale yet sheltered within it. To the right, the title We Were Just Little Boys and the artist’s name, Tace Stevens, appear with quiet restraint. It feels less like an announcement than a threshold — a passage into the story that follows.
From this point, a continuous line of photographs and handwritten testimonies runs along the gallery wall. The format is spare and deliberate: image beside text, alternating, repeating, insistent. The modest scale demands closeness; one leans in to read, to follow the scrawled memories. Visitors fall into the rhythm of the arrangement, walking its length at a slower pace than in a typical exhibition, as if accompanying the story rather than surveying it.
Stevens has an eye for pacing. Wide landscapes work like establishing shots: an empty veranda sagging with time, an interior overtaken by weeds, the afternoon sun falling across corrugated iron. These are not neutral views but places marked by memory. Then come the close-ups: portraits of the Uncles, men who once were boys at Kinchela, their gazes steady, direct, unflinching. They confront the viewer with presence. Between them appear fragments of testimony in the Uncles’ own handwriting — words that refuse silence.
“They took my family love away.”
“Nothing can ease the pain. It will never leave me until the day I die.”
“Identity is knowing who you are, where you come from. Without your identity, who are you?”
The handwriting itself — uneven, jagged in places, bold in others — becomes image. It is not caption but testimony, given equal weight with the photographs. It insists on presence.
At times, juxtapositions heighten the tension. A portrait of an elder with a long beard, backlit against a turquoise wall, is echoed by his own shadow, doubling his presence. Nearby, two elongated shadows stretch across timber boards in dusk light — spectral yet grounding, absence and survival fused in a single frame. The exhibition builds momentum not through spectacle but through rhythm, alternating landscapes, portraits, and words into a slow choreography of memory.
The gallery itself amplifies this rhythm. Agency Projects’ space is stripped back, its industrial bones softened by white paint, its scale intimate enough to feel personal. The atmosphere is hushed, reverent. It does not allow for casual viewing. It insists on a slower engagement, on reading as much as looking, on bearing witness.
Australia’s Stolen Generations
To understand the exhibition, one must step back into history. Along the mid-north coast of New South Wales, on Dunghutti land near Kempsey, stood the Kinchela Aboriginal Boys Training Home. Between 1924 and 1970, somewhere between four hundred and six hundred Aboriginal boys were sent there. They were among thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children forcibly removed from their families under official government and church programs designed to assimilate them into white society. Today we call this history the Stolen Generations.
At Kinchela, names were replaced with numbers. Individuality was erased by administration. In classrooms, children were taught not knowledge but obedience, assimilation drilled in as curriculum. Days were governed by manual labour, punishment, and control. Cruelty and abuse — physical, psychological, sexual — were woven into the daily fabric of life.
The state’s rhetoric told another story. Newspapers such as the Macleay Argus in 1943 praised Kinchela for producing “clean and healthy boys, who will develop into useful citizens.” Photographs accompanied these reports, showing boys in neat rows, hair cropped, clothes uniform, smiles fixed for the camera. These were propaganda images, intended to reassure white Australia that the system was benevolent, that Indigenous children were being “improved.” They erased individuality, recast loss as order, presented discipline as care.
For the boys themselves, the reality was trauma that lasted lifetimes. The photographs showed them as a collective — neat, identical, supposedly thriving — but hid the fear, the beatings, the alienation, the silence at night when they thought of families they could not return to. The state used the camera as a mask, a way to disguise violence as virtue.
It is here that Tace Stevens’s project is most powerful, because her photographs work as a direct reversal of that archive. Where propaganda insisted on uniformity, Stevens insists on individuality. Where the earlier images required silence, she pairs her photographs with the survivors’ handwritten words, restoring voice. Where the state’s images sought to erase kinship and identity, her portraits reveal men as whole beings, eyes steady, faces marked with survival. The very act of photographing them now — on their own terms, in collaboration, with testimony alongside — undoes the lie embedded in those earlier photographs. The reversal is exacting. The same medium once used to cover the truth is now used to tell it.
Since 2003, the Kinchela Boys Home Aboriginal Corporation (KBHAC), formed and led by survivors, has worked to care for those affected and to bring truth-telling into public view. Their vision is to restore the site, not as ruin but as a place of healing, learning, and remembrance. They imagine a centre where survivors gather, where history is taught, where cruelty is acknowledged and resilience honoured.
This is not preservation for heritage tourism. It is preservation as justice. KBHAC has long advocated for the right to manage the grounds themselves, to ensure interpretation remains with those whose lives were shaped there. The World Monuments Fund, through its 2022 World Monuments Watch, has pledged support. By documenting the site, recording oral histories, and amplifying survivors’ voices, the organisation seeks to make the landscape a space of healing and truth-telling.
Even the smallest remnants matter: a child’s footprint pressed into concrete, a forgotten schoolroom overtaken by weeds, a path obscured by decking. Each trace is testimony. Each resists erasure.
The Artist
Into this history steps Tace Stevens, a Noongar and Spinifex visual storyteller based in Perth. A self-taught documentary photographer with a film degree from the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS), Stevens has a background in community development, and her practice is deeply shaped by the principle of story sovereignty — the belief that communities own their own narratives.
Her visual approach is grounded in cinematic pacing. Wide establishing shots anchor place; close-up portraits hold character; spaces of silence carry as much meaning as a gesture. Rather than pursuing commercial cinema, she turned to still photography as a way to work more intimately with community, allowing collaborative storytelling to unfold beyond hierarchical frameworks.
In 2023, Stevens was commissioned by the Magnum Foundation and the World Monuments Fund to work with the Survivors of the Kinchela Boys Home Aboriginal Corporation (KBHAC). She spent long periods on site recording oral histories, revisiting the grounds with Survivors — some for the first time in decades — before raising the camera. Her images are shaped through dialogue and trust, not extractive observation.
Her work joins a wider community of Indigenous photographers in Australia—such as Barbara McGrady, Ricky Maynard, and Tracey Moffatt—who are reclaiming both the medium and the narrative. Stevens’s cinematic sensibility, ethical collaboration, and personal connection as a Noongar and Spinifex woman make her contribution distinct.
In her words, she aims to “walk with stories rather than take them.” That ethos is clear in We Were Just Little Boys, where images accompany, hold, insist — recording presence rather than spectacle.
The Photobook
If the exhibition is collective, cinematic, the photobook is personal, intimate. In the corner of the gallery opposite the entrance, a table displayed We Were Just Little Boys, the photobook published by Tall Poppy Press. The book is square, 124 pages, and carefully designed. To hold it is to enter the work differently.
Where the gallery walls confront at scale, the book draws you close. You bend toward the page, tracing the grain of an image, following the scrawl of handwriting. The pace slows. The sequencing echoes the exhibition but creates new rhythms: pauses between images, spreads where text dominates, juxtapositions that feel almost whispered.
The reproduction respects texture and shadow. Photographs retain their tonal weight, handwriting appears as if inscribed directly. The book feels tactile — the weight of the paper stock, the matte finish that resists glare, the slight give of the binding. It is designed to be read slowly, to be lived with.
The inclusion of testimonies from the Uncles and a contribution from KBHAC’s CEO reinforces the book’s collaborative nature. This is not an artist’s monograph but a shared record. Half of the proceeds go directly to KBHAC, ensuring the book is not only art object but advocacy tool.
Tall Poppy Press has built a reputation for producing photobooks that balance quality with accessibility. Their ethos is to make carefully crafted books that allow important projects to circulate widely, not gather dust on collectors’ shelves. By publishing Stevens’s work, they give permanence to testimony, ensuring it travels far beyond the walls of the gallery.
Institutions as Framework
The project’s strength also lies in the framework that holds it. Three organisations — the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Agency Projects, and Tall Poppy Press — each contribute something distinct and necessary.
The Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), founded in 1986 in Fitzroy and now a cornerstone of Melbourne’s photographic culture, has long defined itself as a space where photography meets critical questions of society and art. CCP is not simply a venue; it is an institution committed to championing work that challenges, unsettles, and expands the role of photography. By presenting We Were Just Little Boys, CCP places Stevens’s work firmly within the discourse of contemporary art in Australia, signalling that truth-telling is not peripheral but central to our cultural imagination.
Agency Projects, the host of the exhibition in Collingwood, is an Indigenous-led organisation dedicated to cultural advocacy and decolonising practice. It describes itself as a cultural incubator, supporting Indigenous artists, knowledge holders, and communities through projects that move across art, architecture, and performance. Its mission is rooted in collaboration, sovereignty, and the principle that culture is a living force. To walk into Agency’s building, an old factory reimagined as gallery and workspace, is to step into an organisation that treats art as inseparable from advocacy. Hosting Stevens’s work here underscores the point: this is not only an exhibition but an act of truth-telling, supported by an organisation built to hold such truths.
Together, they create a framework that is curatorial, ethical, and practical. CCP situates the work within the national conversation of art. Agency Projects anchors it in Indigenous-led advocacy and cultural context. Tall Poppy Press extends it into the world of books, ensuring it endures. The collaboration ensures that We Were Just Little Boys is not isolated as art object but lives as testimony, archive, and act of justice.
Witnessing and Reflection
What the exhibition and the book achieve is a reversal. Photography, once used as propaganda to present Kinchela as a place of assimilation, is reclaimed as testimony. The camera, once an instrument of erasure, becomes a tool of presence. The men once depicted as numbers stand as individuals, gazing back, speaking through images and words.
The handwritten testimonies dismantle the hierarchy of image over text. Together, words and photographs form a counter-archive, a reclamation of history. They assert that memory belongs not to state records but to those who lived it.
For the viewer, the experience is unsettling. It is not designed for comfort. It asks not for admiration but for recognition. It insists that the past is not finished, that truth requires attention.
WHEN I stepped back onto Easey Street, the rain had stopped. The factory building looked unchanged — its graffiti, its torn posters, its darkened bricks. Cars passed, people hurried by, the city continued.
But something lingered. Inside, testimony had been made visible, inscribed on walls, carried in images, spoken through silence. The portraits, the words, the landscapes heavy with absence — they followed me out, insistent.
We Were Just Little Boys is not an exhibition to be left behind. It is a reckoning, a reclamation, a demand. In Collingwood, in the pared-back rooms of an old factory, truth was given walls. In the photobook, it was given pages. Together, they insist on presence.
And they endure still, carried beyond the gallery into the unsettled conscience of a nation.
Exhibition Details
We Were Just Little Boys
Exhibition by Tace Stevens
Presented by Agency Projects in partnership with the Centre for Contemporary Photography and Tall Poppy Press
Agency Projects, 47 Easey Street, Collingwood, Melbourne
30 August – 5 October 2025
Book Details
We Were Just Little Boys
By Tace Stevens, with contributions from Survivors of Kinchela Boys Home and KBHAC
Published by Tall Poppy Press, 2025
124 pages, softcover, limited edition of 500
50% of proceeds support the Kinchela Boys Home Aboriginal Corporation (KBHAC)
Photobook images courtesy of Tall Poppy Press
