‘Speaking to, with and about’: Cherbourg women’s memory of domestic work as activist counter-memory

Abstract

This article considers distinctive mediums of memory emerging from the traumatic history of Aboriginal women’s experiences as domestic workers in Queensland, Australia throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One is the exhibition Many Threads presented in 2014 at the Ration Shed Museum in the Aboriginal community of Cherbourg in southern Queensland. The other is the collaborative memoir Auntie Rita by Jackie Huggins and Rita Huggins, which recounts Rita’s life through a dialogue between mother and daughter. The article uses a reading of Jackie’s voice, as consciously activist and feminist, as a way in to understanding the testimonial memory of other Cherbourg women. In remembering, interpreting and presenting their experiences as domestic workers, alongside those of their mothers, grandmothers, aunts and sisters, Cherbourg women are actively intervening in historical and contemporary discourses that seek to limit their representation to that of victims and their community as intrinsically dysfunctional. Instead, through yarning, writing and sewing, Cherbourg women are generating memories, and memory communities, of resistance, strength, resilience, creativity and survival. The paper argues that this memory work is a vital form of counter-memory, which disturbs and unsettles normative Australian representations.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Auntie Sandra Morgan, Auntie Grace Bond and Robyn Hofmeyr of the Ration Shed Museum, Cherbourg and the members of the Many Threads group for assisting with this research.

Notes

1. Many Threads is a case study for the PhD in Museums Studies I am undertaking at the University of Queensland. I have been involved with the Cherbourg community, through the Ration Shed, since 2011. I took part in the Many Threads workshops, interviewed the participants before, during and after the workshop and also assisted with the exhibition, thus occupying multiple positions including researcher, curator and group member, as well as non-Indigenous woman and someone from outside the community. While I focus here on the experiences of Aboriginal women, I am aware that the lives and histories of Indigenous and non-Indigenous women are inevitably entangled: I too am part of this history and benefit from my position as a privileged white woman in Australia because of it. I see being a member of the Many Threads group and working reflexively with Cherbourg women as a way to take responsibility for a shared past and bring it to greater attention. See Haskins (2006).

2. www.rationshed.com.au

3. Lyrics of Cherbourg That’s my Home by Robert (Rocko) Langton and Harold Chapman of the band Muddy Flats, written in response to the numerous negative media reports about Cherbourg in the 1980s.

4. The Stolen Generations is the term coined by historian, Peter Read, to describe the policy and practice of the removal of Aboriginal children from their families by successive Australian governments. Stolen Wages refers to the extensive controls put in place by governments throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries over the employment, working conditions and wages of Indigenous workers which permitted the non-payment of wages to some workers, as well as the underpayment of wages, and the diversion of wages into trust and savings accounts.

5. In his comprehensive history of domestic service in Australia, Higman (2002) consistently highlights that Aboriginal domestic servants experienced worse conditions and greater disadvantage than other domestic servants (cf. 173, 177, 262). As he concludes, inequality ‘shows itself to be the driving force of domestic service’ (277). Henry Reynolds also references the Southern Protector of Aboriginals Archibald Meston when he extensively toured southwest Queensland in 1900 finding that on only two stations were Aboriginal domestic workers paid anything at all (1990, 207).

6. Under the succession of Queensland’s Protection Acts, the then Department of Native Affairs kept personal files on every Aboriginal person who lived on a government reserve. It was not until the 1980s that Aboriginal people were aware of these files and gained access to them.