Book review: Apron-Sorrow / Sovereign-Tea
A new book by Natalie Harkin presents stories from First Nations women and girls bound by more than 50 years of institutionalised indentured domestic service.
Award winning poet and artist Natalie Harkin is a Narungga activist and scholar who was raised on Kaurna land and has dedicated much of her life’s work to reconciliation through collaborative truth-telling. Her latest book, Apron-Sorrow / Sovereign-Tea, is a compilation of reportage, direct transcription and artistic interpretation making visible South Australia’s Aboriginal women and girls who were indentured domestic servants between the years 1907-1961. Undervalued and exploited through withheld, stolen or controlled wages, and the horrific displacement from home and their people, these are their collective stories.
With a foreword by the inimitable Aboriginal activist, scholar and author Jackie Huggins, Apron-Sorrow / Sovereign-Tea is an important work gathered from Aboriginal archival documents. Harkin, herself, is a direct descendant of women bound to colonialist domestic servitude, and she writes with clarity and determination about the system and its lasting inheritance. Hers is an urgency tempered by years of haunting. In talking about her archival work, she writes:
“This is private, intimate reading, and these young women and girls will not let me rest. Their voices penetrate every membrane of every cell in my body until I recognise them as my own, and like proper good nanas and aunties, they are not letting me off the hook. Their apron linen is pressed against my skin, and I see their dust rise and float on shards of light. My hands are red-raw and my back aches.”
The book is visually stunning, as Harkin’s coloured photographs of performance art, installation and a leadlight triptych illuminate the words, courtesy of Unbound Collective, the nationally applauded group of First Nations women based on Kaurna Yarta of which Harkin is a member. Poetry, too, interrupts the usual prose flow, and the book is stronger for these variations on theme and aesthetic.
In the section titled ‘Memory Stories,’ Harkin transcribes twelve personal narratives collected over hours of deep and free conversation. “Our grandmothers from forever away and not so long ago invited themselves to the table,” she writes, “poured themselves a strong cuppa from the steeping teapot, and guided our conversations with laughter, lessons and love.”
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I felt this keenly, this celebration of the strength and determination of Aboriginal women in domestic service, and here the book finds its core strength in the community and commonality of lived and passed-on experiences. These women and their stories matter, and readers might find themselves holding one hand to their heart while the other makes a fist, raised high in solidarity. Sharon Meagher, one of the twelve women, writes “Mum was always humble, and I know she would be proud for her story to be out there.”
Whereas ‘Memory Stories’ is an infectious elevation of lives well-lived and proof of an interminable appreciation for them by their female kin, the proceeding ‘Voices from the Archive’ is a gut punch. Having typed the keyword ‘Domestic’ into the State Records Aboriginal Information Management System database, then pored over 2,549 pages of correspondence letters, Harkin presents us with the raw material.
Most shocking are the cold, often flippant responses between white government administrators and privileged white women seeking live-in domestic help – their descriptions of the girls are spooned out in degrees of Blackness and suitable age. The young servants might request a holiday home, having been denied one for two years, only to be denied again because there is fear it might take them too long to readjust to living away from home and family once given a taste. These are the voices of the State and the employers, and also of the families and the girls’ themselves.
This is a significant book, equally beautiful and brutal. Harkin should be praised for laying out these documents and stories for us, adding to Aboriginal archives, and to Australia’s authenticated history.
Apron-Sorrow / Sovereign-Tea by Natalie Harkin (Wakefield Press) is out now