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
