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

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.