SESSION 2:

‘APRON-SORROW / SOVEREIGN-TEA: Aboriginal Women’s Domestic Service Stories in South Australia’ presented by Natalie Harkin

Tickets

APRON-SORROW / SOVEREIGN-TEA evokes an embodied reckoning with Aboriginal women’s domestic labour and servitude drawing from oral history and the State’s official record. It explores the complexity of Aboriginal women’s experiences and survival strategies, and intergenerational stories that span loss, love, sorrow, solidarity, resistance, and refusal.

This work is an archival-poetic collaboration with Aboriginal women, curated to produce a series of video-projections, a tryptic of leadlight windows, and twelve personal Memory Stories on domestic servitude unique to South Australia. It is the work of active honouring to generate collective recognition and remembrance of unrecognised Aboriginal women’s labour contributions to this state; a means to maintain past lives in the present and contribute new ways to negotiate official histories of erasure and deficit narratives of our lives. It is also an invitation to lean in close and bear witness, not only to the oppressive racialised, gendered assimilation-based policies of state, but to the individual and collective power, sorrow, rage and resilience of Aboriginal women and above all, enduring love.

APRON-SORROW / SOVEREIGN-TEA is also an archival-poetic interrogation of the state’s colonial archive as a critical site of memory, conservation, preservation and erasure that continues to resonate as a contemporary repository of social meaning. The State Aboriginal Records’ ‘Domestic Service’ files reveal the unfolding rationale for interdependent policies of child-removal, institutionalisation and domestic training as important context to the burgeoning Aboriginal domestic service workforce into the twentieth century. Records reveal critical voices from Protectors and mission superintendents, white employers, the parents, girls and women themselves placed into training or service. These records trigger questions about surveillance, representation and agency. They are deeply confronting and at the same time, ripe for critique, explication and response.

Presentation time: Wednesday 7 May 2025, 6:30 pm
Presentation duration: 40-45 minutes

2025 Book: www.wakefieldpress.com.au/product/apron-sorrow-sovereign-tea/
2021 Exhibition: https://vitalstatistix.com.au/projects/apron-sorrow-sovereign-tea/

Image: Natalie Harkin with Unbound Collective, video still, Days of Our Lives, 2021, single channel video, Frankie Films videography, Jessica Wallace editor/sound director.