APRON-SORROW / SOVEREIGN-TEA: Aboriginal Domestic Service Stories in South Australia.
Please join South Australian poet and Narungga woman, Associate Professor Natalie Harkin from Flinders University, as she delivers this year’s Gladys Elphick Oration: APRON-SORROW / SOVEREIGN-TEA: Aboriginal Domestic Service Stories in South Australia.
Associate Professor Natalie Harkin
Natalie has a strong interest in archival justice, engaging archival-poetic methods to document community Memory Stories, Aboriginal women’s domestic service labour histories, and Indigenous Living-Legacy archive innovations for our time. Her words have been installed and projected in mixed-media exhibitions, including ten years collaborating with the Unbound Collective, and her books include Dirty Words (Cordite Books, 2015), Archival-poetics (Vagabond Press, 2019), and APRON-SORROW / SOVEREIGN-TEA (Wakefield Press, in-press).
The Third Annual Gladys Elphick Oration
she lingers in archives / her trace is my memory / we labour dig sweat blister imagine / know them more intimately / so much work to be done to clean up this colonial mess
Our Aboriginal women’s domestic service stories are largely invisible and not widely acknowledged or understood as significant in official narratives of history in South Australia. This oration presents a creative-arts based research project on this labour history, including a collaborative exhibition presented for Tarnanthi in 2021, titled APRON-SORROW / SOVEREIGN-TEA. This is an intergenerational project of honouring Aboriginal women through state colonial archives and blood-memory stories that span loss, love, sorrow, solidarity, resistance, and pride.
Date: Tuesday 27 August 2024
Time: 7:30pm
Location: The Drill Hall, Torrens Parade Ground, Victoria Dr, Adelaide
BOOK HERE
Free parking available on site.
Presented by History Trust of South Australia, Reconciliation SA, The Gladys Elphick Awards, Department for Environment and Water, and Attorney-General’s Department.
Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander viewers are advised that this event contains the name and image of a person now passed and resting in the Dreaming.