Uncle Leslie Franks, 2025

The Kinchela Boys Home (KBH) site was a NSW state-run institution near Kempsey, that operated from 1924 – 1970. Hundreds of Aboriginal boys, who were forcibly removed from their families, were sent here. The purpose of this institution and others like it, was to assimilate Aboriginal children into white society. The policies that allowed for this created what are today referred to as the Stolen Generations. Uncle Leslie Franks, pictured at the front of his house in Cairns, was one of these boys. He has worked hard his entire life, and is a talented artist, who not just uses furniture to create works of art, but also built a model of the Kinchela Boys Home. I’ve been able to see Uncle Leslie a few times, and have seen how much his family loves him. This photo is from a larger body of work, We Were Just Little Boys, which is about these little boys returning as old men, and explores their relationship with this site, through observational photography and portraiture. The intention of these double exposure portraits was to give a face to the young boys who went through KBH. These portraits are a form of evidence. Uncle Leslie’s portrait is overlayed with a section of trees, which comes from an archival image of a group of Kinchela boys.

Tace Stevens is a Noongar and Spinifex visual storyteller based in Boorloo/Perth, Western Australia. She is a self-taught documentary photographer with a film degree from the Australian Film and Television Radio School. With a background in community development and education, story sovereignty and authenticity are important to her work.

In 2023, Tace received a grant from Magnum Foundation to work with the Survivors of the Kinchela Boys Home, a state-run institution that forcibly removed hundreds of Indigenous boys from their families between 1924 and 1970. This work, We Were Just Little Boys, was featured in “On Country: Photography from Australia”, a group exhibition at Les Rencontres d’Arles. In July 2025, it was published as a debut monograph by Tall Poppy Press.