Rochelle Patten is an artist from Cummeragunja, Victoria. As a child, she lived in many different places as a child because her father worked at seasonal jobs. In 1956, her parents separated, and Patten moved with her mother to South Australia where the family was very poor and had to survive on bush foods and other people's leftovers from wherever they could find it. Patten's mother moved their family constantly, mainly due to her fear that her children were going to be taken away.
When Patten was seventeen she gave birth to her first child, but by the time she was eighteen she was suffering from alcoholism. It took her four years to recover from her addiction - during that time she travelled around the south eastern countryside of Australia. In Watsonia she did a course in Welfare Assistance, upon completion she started working at a woman's refuge. Patten then worked for the Aboriginal Legal Service (ALS) for fifteen months.
It was around the time Patten was finishing with ALS that the Indigenous people from Cummeragunja received the title to the land. She went back to Cummeragunja to help establish the community there. Patten did an 'Introduction to Trade' at TAFE, during the course she helped build houses on Cummeragunja. Unfortunately there were not enough people attending the course and it was shut down. A week before Patten was going to move away, she fell from a ladder on the building sites.
Patten's injuries required her not to work for six weeks. While she was receiving physio in the form of acupuncture, she started to draw because she did not like lying down for the treatment. From drawing she went into painting and one of the first few paintings she did was sold through Boomalli Aboriginal Artist Co-operative and the painting ended up in Paris. Not long after, the Museum of Melbourne bought eleven of her paintings and four of them were exhibited, in what was Patten's first exhibition.
(Source: A Story to Tell : The Working Lives of Ten Aboriginal Australians, (ed.) Gallagher, N., Cambridge University Press, 1992)
