Presented by: Natalie Harkin
The APRON-SORROW / SOVEREIGN-TEA program 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. 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.
Presented by National Trust of South Australia, History Trust of South Australia, & Ayers House Function Centre