Imposter finding guts artist

Sylvia Huege de Serville and one of her Aboriginal paintings

Two months ago, ex-pat New Zealander Sylvia Huege de Serville was enjoying the greatest success of her artistic career.

She had four works touring Australia as part of prestigious Aboriginal art awards, three in private Australian collections and a studio full of paintings about to be shipped to Melbourne for an exhibition. Then she found out she is an imposter.

At 56, Huege de Serville's speciality is art that illustrates injustices, particularly to dispossessed people. Over the decade since she began painting seriously she has illustrated the plight of Maori, Tahitians and now Aborigines.

It is a controversial field, especially if you are not part of the dispossessed group, as Huege de Serville found after winning New Zealand's $4000 Mainland Art award in 1999 with her pastel A distant cry from our Tupuna.

"That ruffled a few feathers because I wasn't a Maori even though I was married to one and my children are part Maori," she says. "I was almost physically attacked by one woman ... got lumped in with every Pakeha who's ripped off Maori design."

Two years later, she moved to Australia to investigate her Aboriginal roots. She won the Peoples' Choice award in the Telstra Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Awards for her work Assimilation Blues. Three graphite drawings were chosen to tour as part of the RAKA collection, also open only to Aboriginal artists.

Although none of the awards were worth money, Huege de Serville's reputation as an Aboriginal artist grew. Her paintings started to fetch up to $7000.

Then in late September, she received a letter from a distant cousin revealing that she is not Aborigine at all. "I'm most embarrassed," she says, from her studio in Brisbane. "I've had my guts ripped out of me."

Huege de Serville, sister of Paul of the hairdressing chain, mother of three, was born in Tauranga and lived most recently on Waiheke Island. Her belief she was Aborigine goes back to her great-grandmother, known as "Wee Mum".

"My grandmother, her daughter, told me she was Aborigine. Later my mother's cousin, who was raised by Wee Mum, verified it ... that's where it came from. We suspected she was one of the Stolen Generation who was taken away from her culture and ended up in New Zealand."

But a Tauranga cousin sent Huege de Serville first a birth certificate, then a copy of the family tree. To her dismay her great-great-grandfather, father of Wee Mum, was described as "Indian".

"My roots came from Bermuda ... It was like being slapped on the side of the head with a piece of 4 by 2."

Research revealed that Huege de Serville's great-great-grandfather's ancestors had been among 500 Native American slaves taken from the Wampanoag people near New York in the late 1600s and shipped to St David's Island in Bermuda to work the salt fields. There is also a chance that Wee Mum may have been part-African, courtesy of the African slaves who were also held there.

Huege de Serville, faced with the fact that she was an artistic imposter, fell into "a spiral of despair". First she contacted her dealer and the curators managing her touring paintings. They chose to keep her works on exhibition, but with a disclaimer explaining she is not Aborigine. At this stage her works remain in the private collections of the University of West Sydney and Perth's Berhnt Museum of Anthropology.

Next she fled to her daughter Hana in Dannevirke to ponder her future. Now she has decided to come clean to her fans, explain her honest mistake, and carry on.

In Australia, too, indigenous people are suspicious of others trying to claim their culture, she says. Art, especially, is guarded even more fiercely than in New Zealand.

But new paintings stacked against the wall of her makeshift studio in Brisbane will go to the gallery in Melbourne. Her exhibition will go ahead.

"I'm probably doing the best work I've ever done in my life ...

"I'm going to test the waters. Hey, they thought it was okay when I was Aboriginal."