Call Out for Australia’s Forgotten Mothers

When I return from Canada I realize that I must do it.  I must make a memorial for Australia’s Forgotten Mothers. I must actualize the idea that came to me in a rite of empassioned writing on my mother and my forbidden unknown grandmother

        

whose presence came to me through the mists of absence and forgetting

I must make a plinth and cover it with the names of Australia’s forgotten mothers, erased and lost from official records.

 I will call out for people to send the names of mothers and grandmothers and great grandmothers who were lost and hidden and eradicated from official records in the 20th century decades of the stolen generations.

The decades that the returned and fallen soldiers from the world wars were memorialized and remembered, and returned, over and over again.

This will be my research project for the next 3 years, culminating in 2015, the hundred-year anniversary of Gallipoli, birth of the ANZAC legend.  The erection of the plinth -could it be a more female shape, say, an oval, or heart shape that can be walked through like a doorway or shell or grove, like Persephone’s grove…with a spring bubbling up from the underworld…

Covered with the names in tear shaped, fertility-symbol shaped, plaques.

Accompanied by a book of names and stories: stories of the mothers lost by their relatives.

A book that recounts the birth of the project, from conceptual idea to fruition in materialized form, the progression from the personal dimension of vision, dream, inspiration, ideation to the social realm of language and culture.

I have made a drawing of the shape of the structure, which includes a central figurative statue of a mother and child. My first thought is that it should be constructed at Balmoral, in the park on the esplanade, or perhaps on the oval, on the edge of the trees, or as I keep thinking, on top of Georges Heights up with the artists’ studios… with the 360 degree view of the harbor, although it’s windy and unprotected up there,

I think I like the idea of the grove or grotto most of all on the (edge of the) oval, and I could bury Mum’s ashes there… or at least some of them…like a blessing, her blessing.

The shape of the memorial would echo the shape of the caves at Balmoral, the caves where the first nation’s people lived… looking out over the placid stretch of water now known as middle harbor.

18.5.2012

© Copyright Ruth Skilbeck, 2012