The official stolen wages narrative in South Australia to date has been one of denial and refusal, despite meticulous preliminary archival research by Cameron Raynes (2005, 2009a) and Ross Kidd (2007). The matter of stolen wages is described as ‘one of the nation’s greatest barriers to reconciliation and justice for Indigenous people’ (Kidd 2007: 10) and remains as unfinished business in South Australia.
Basket, video-still | Harkin, Baker and Finney, 2014.
The need to tell our own stories, from our diverse, localised Indigenous standpoints is ongoing, and there is so much work to be done to effectively trace this history of indentured servitude and stolen wages in South Australia; further explore critical and intimate intersections of race, gender and labour exploitation; and expand our understandings of a gendered and racialised labour movement. In the interests of truth-telling, especially for our Elders primarily impacted by systemic slavery and abuses, we need urgent access our own records, the right to a just hearing, and to heal.
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 --Natalie Harkin 2019.
As Alexis Wright (2016) describes, we have been locked in in this storytelling war from the point of first contact; a war that still fosters and maintains negative, racialised, stereotyped narratives about who we are, and invades every sense of our sovereignty and resistance. As contemporary agents of memory, there are multiple ways to share the weight of these stories; to collectively move through a decolonising project of poetic refusal, resistance and memory-making, through and beyond the colonial archive. Indigenous writers and creative practitioners have become increasingly concerned with the politics of representation and question of sovereignty, authenticity and voice; a continuum response to being defined, categorised and written about by cultural institutions of power that historically rendered us voiceless (Heiss 2003, 2006; Wright 2016).
A basket can indeed carry many things and there are multiple ways to lighten the load and collectively move through it all. We are poets, writers, scholars, curators, artists and filmmakers critically engaging with archives through blood-memory and emotion, and we labour creatively with decolonising intent. We are the detectives in a colonial crime scene, and the miners searching for hearts of gold. We trust our intuition, through and beyond the colonial archive, to weave blankets of stories to warm us from the cold. We follow our ancestors’ gaze towards future generations where their dignity shines, and this is their lasting impression.
APRON-SORROW / SOVEREIGN-TEA | video-still, Unbound Collective, 2021.
APRON-SORROW / SOVEREIGN-TEA is presented by Vitalstatistix for Tarnanthi Festival, October 2021. This project has been supported by the Australian Research Council. It also features with a sister exhibition curated by Dr Ali Gumillya Baker in partnership with Flinders University Museum of Art in 2021-22.
APRON-SORROW / SOVEREIGN-TEA is an installation and public program by Natalie Harkin and collaborators, such as Unbound Collective, Ali Gumillya Baker, Simone Ullalka Tur and Faye Rosas Blanch, and women from her local community in South Australia who share their stories to make this evocative, multidisciplinary installation. This installation evokes an embodied reckoning with Aboriginal women’s domestic labour and servitude, and premieres at the Waterside Workers Hall in Port Adelaide. The work explores the complexity of women’s experiences and survival strategies; intergenerational stories that span loss, love, sorrow, solidarity, resistance and refusal. This work draws from both oral history and the State’s official record to engage with and creatively transform the colonial archive, contributing new understandings to Aboriginal women’s labour histories in South Australia; and culminating in a significant process of trace and return through shadows, spectres and paper trails. Harkin draws on archival-poetics as praxis, informed by blood-memory, haunting and grandmother stories, to develop work with collaborators. The presentation will also include commissioned performance and a symposium about domestic labour and stolen wages.
