Cherishing sovereign sisters

Sovereign sisters: domestic work tells the stories of Indigenous girls and women placed as cleaners, cooks, nannies and wet nurses in white households and institutions across Australia.

“It’s a history of indentured labour,” says exhibition co-curator, participating artist and Flinders University academic Dr Ali Gumillya Baker. “Forced domestic service, with no wages or wages seized by the state, as part of the nation’s eugenics-based assimilation policies designed to absorb Aboriginal people into the white populations.”

For Ali, like the other 12 contemporary Indigenous artists represented, the history behind the exhibition is deeply personal. The Mirning woman from the Nullarbor on South Australia’s West Coast says her own Nana was put into domestic servitude when she was just six years old, while her Nana’s older sister Ruby was an unpaid domestic in the house of a police officer for 40 years. Ruby’s life is the theme of Ali’s own featured work, sovereignGODDESSnotdomestic, which is one of a series dedicated to the life of Nanas.

“I wanted to honour Nana Ruby’s story and that whole generation of my grandmother, and the incredible women who I grew up with.”

Dr Ali Gumillya Baker speaking on artwork by Natalie Harkin, Archive-Fever-Paradox, 2013, ink on banana leaf paper. On loan from the artist, © the artist.

Artwork in the background: Leah King-Smith, Untitled #11 from the series Patterns of connection, 1991, direct positive colour photograph. The Vizard Foundation Art Collection of the 1990s, acquired 1994. On loan from the Ian Potter Museum of Art, the University of Melbourne.

Photo credit: Brianna Speight

Like Ali, many of the artists in the exhibition pay homage to their female relatives and their life stories, while other artists reflect on the widespread exploitation of First Nation’s women and girls more broadly, and the impact of these practices in the present day.

A prominent piece in Sovereign sisters in this regard is the series Look Who’s Calling The Kettle Black (1992) by acclaimed Australian experimental artist r e a, of the Gamilaraay people of northern New South Wales. This series comprises 10 limited edition inkjet prints, juxtaposing archival photographs of Aboriginal women working as domestic servants with textbook definitions and racially profiled terms used to describe them. Created while r e a was completing their Bachelor of Fine Arts (Visual Arts) nearly 30 years ago, it was the first body of work ever exhibited by the artist.

“Since then, r e a’s practice has grappled with many issues affecting Aboriginal women, including domestic slavery, the removal of Aboriginal children, and the experience of women being kept in missions,” Ali says.

“r e a’s work is powerful, provocative and deeply moving.”

FUMA is privileged to display r e a’s Kettle series in Sovereign sisters, which is the on loan from the artist. In fact, the museum is also fortunate to have first option to acquire this significant work for its contemporary collections—a rare chance to obtain the complete series while also ensuring one of Australia’s most prominent contemporary Indigenous artists is represented in South Australia.

Note: Donations to FUMA in this year’s Annual Appeal will contribute to acquiring this important work. If you would like to support this, please donate here.

As part of FUMA’s permanent holdings, Look Who’s Calling The Kettle Black will contribute ongoingly to the conversation around this still recent history of Indigenous domestic labour, which is not necessarily taught in schools and has received very little exposure in South Australia to date.

Ali, who teaches across a range of Indigenous topics as a Senior Lecturer in Flinders’ College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, says it is not something her students come into the University with knowledge of.

“Artworks like r e a’s are important because they facilitate really deep conversations about those histories and their intergenerational impacts, how we understand healing and ideas of reconciliation and decolonisation, and what they mean for the present,” she says.

r e a, Iron from Look Who’s Calling The Kettle Black, 1992, dye sublimation print, 19 x 25 cm, On loan from the artist, © r e a, 2021

r e a, Washer from Look Who’s Calling The Kettle Black, 1992, dye sublimation print, 19 x 25 cm, On loan from the artist, © r e a, 2021

“r e a’s series—and this whole exhibition—shows how many artists have looked at these histories in their own families and contributed these incredible gifts of knowledge to help transform those experiences—which were often violent, painful and heartbreaking—into something that builds understanding.”

Ali says this contributes not only to understanding ideas of race in relation to reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, but also in relation to ideas of race generally.

"It's often more challenging to examine things directly in the present, but when you can look back, it is easier to reflect on how you would change things and do things differently. The histories represented in this exhibition can be connected with today’s incarceration statistics, the Intervention policies impacting Aboriginal communities, asylum seeker policies, policies on citizenship, how we understand community and justice and the ways we think about anti-racism and ideas around fear and xenophobia,” she says.

“We can teach about these things really well by looking at this kind of artwork, because unlike a textbook which teaches through often dry language, art allows you to consider the emotional aspect of that history and what that means; it allows you to go quite deep, quite quickly, and gives students a more immediate access for forming their own critical understanding.

“We use the collection to invite people to create an intimate and personal relationship [with the content], because artwork allows us to do that.”

Ali describes this is as “the gift” of FUMA’s Object Based Learning (OBL) program, through which Flinders’ academic staff are supported to use its collections to teach complex ideas across a significant number of disciplines, including nursing, midwifery, medicine, psychiatry, social work, education, criminology, and all public health and arts and humanities subjects.

“Across our Indigenous Studies topics, which are embedded for many of these disciplines, we literally teach thousands of students in this way every year,” Ali says.

“We don't want to make a shallow job of this, because if you teach this history badly, you can have a more detrimental effect on the community. Graduates may go out as teachers and social workers thinking they know something when they haven't properly understood it. The importance of teaching these histories well impacts on all of our communities.”

OBL is a critical part of FUMA’s absolute commitment to representing Indigenous voices and using its nationally significant collection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art to drive cultural learning in Indigenous knowledges, perspectives and lived experiences.

Sovereign sisters is a sister show to APRON-SORROW / SOVEREIGN-TEA, curated by Dr Natalie Harkin at Vitalstatistix, with both exhibitions presented as part of the Tarnanthi Festival.

The exhibition was formally launched on 21 October in the FUMA Gallery (Bedford Park campus) by Nici Cumpston, Artistic Director of Tarnanthi and Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art for the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Members of the public can view the exhibition until 8 April 2022 (excluding holiday closure 20 December 2021 – 10 January 2022). See FUMA opening hours and location

You, too, can contribute to the courageous conversations driving reconciliation in Australia by supporting FUMA.

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FUMA is registered with the Australian Government Cultural Gifts Program and welcomes the opportunity to discuss artwork giving through this initiative.

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