In 1905, the Western Australian government passed an act declaring all Aboriginal and part-Aboriginal children wards of the state, granting the Chief Protector of Aborigines the legal power to remove them from their families. Children with European ancestry were particular targets, taken to break their connection to Aboriginal language and culture - a policy now known as the Stolen Generations. Boys were trained as agricultural labourers; girls were intended for domestic service. Carrolup Native Settlement was established in 1915, not far from the town of Katanning, after white farmers and settlers complained about Aboriginal families living on the fringes of town. Together with Moore River, Roelands, and Gnowangerup, it formed part of a network of institutions that housed most of the Noongar people of southwestern Western Australia. The official policy was described, with chilling euphemism, as "smoothing the pillow of a dying race." Officials took little or no action in cases of sexual abuse of girls by those charged with their care.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, something unexpected emerged from Carrolup. Children at the settlement began producing artwork - vivid portrayals of the Western Australian bush at sunset, rendered with a sensitivity and skill that attracted attention far beyond the settlement's fences. The Carrolup artists included Revel Cooper, Reynold Hart, Mervyn Hill, Parnell Dempster, Claude Kelly, Micky Jackson, and Barry Loo. Exhibitions were organized in Perth and cities across Australia. With the assistance of Florence Rutter, an English woman who became their advocate, the children's work was shown in London, Manchester, Edinburgh, and Glasgow. Here were artworks created by members of the Stolen Generations - among the only extant objects produced by these children across all of Australia - and they depicted not the confinement of their lives but the beauty of the country from which they had been taken.

Rutter had assembled the collection to exhibit and sell on behalf of the children, working through the Aboriginal Children's Trust in London. But a con man robbed her of everything - her own savings and the Trust's funds alike. Destitute, she sold the collection to Herbert Mayer of New York. Mayer gifted it to Colgate University in 1966, where it remained until anthropologist Howard Morphy located it at the Picker Gallery in 2004. A year later, Noongar elder Athol Farmer, Ezzard Flowers, and researcher John Stanton travelled to the United States to inspect the works and select pieces for the 2006 "Koorah Coolingah" (Children Long Ago) exhibition at Katanning, with a parallel showing at the Western Australian Museum as part of the Perth International Arts Festival. Today, Curtin University's John Curtin Gallery holds 125 works brought back to Noongar Boodja, and is developing a Centre for Truth Telling to house them permanently.

In 1987, community members launched a project to establish a Cultural Centre at Marribank. Two Noongar trainees, Tina Hansen and Cora Farmer, funded by the Aboriginal Arts Board of the Australia Council, worked with John Stanton at the University of Western Australia's Berndt Museum of Anthropology to learn collections management, exhibition design, and photographic documentation. The Cultural Centre opened in 1988 in the Old Boys' Dormitory, funded by the Australian Bicentennial Authority. Its first exhibition traced the history of Carrolup and the emergence of the "bush landscape" school of art. A second room displayed contemporary Noongar works. A further gallery focused on the Marribank years and opened in 1992. Prominent Aboriginal artists who began their creative lives at the settlement were the subject of national touring exhibitions, including "Nyungar Landscapes" and "Aboriginal Artists of the South-West."

After the settlement was abandoned, many of its buildings fell into disrepair. The dormitories, the classrooms, the administrative buildings where permission to marry was granted or denied - all succumbed to weather and neglect. In 2016, a project was launched to transform the site into a cultural healing centre for Stolen Generations survivors and their communities. Marribank sits in the Shire of Kojonup, approximately 30 kilometres northwest of Katanning, in gently rolling farmland that gives no outward sign of what happened here. But the Noongar people have not forgotten. The paintings that the children made - those luminous sunsets over country they were forbidden to live in freely - have outlasted the policies that tried to erase the culture from which they came.