An Imagined Archive of Institutional Memory – A Visual Essay on the Artwork of Parragirls

Abstract

For this focus section of Curator, Lily Hibberd with Bonney Djuric and Nina Lewis revisit their research paper and workshop presented at the ‘Archive as Art & The Imagined Archive’ 14th Community Informatics Research Network (CIRN) conference in 2017. Parragirls – former residents of an Australian state‐run child welfare institution – have deployed art as a device to contest both public memory and the official institutional record. Structured as an annotated portfolio and conversation between the three contributors, this visual essay reflects on a range of artistic strategies, including experimental printmaking, that interrogate and activate the living archive of Parramatta Girls Home through the women’s own testimony, memory and creative agency.

Parramatta Female Factory Precinct as a Site of Conscience: Using Institutional Pasts to Shape Just Legal Futures

“…The film offers them a position of authority, in contrast to the victim's identity as a powerless dependent of the state. 148 In this work, the audience is situated in an immersive 360-degree, 3-dimensional video installation (as first displayed in UNSW EPICentre's cylinder cinema), in which they are slowly 'walked' through the grounds of PGH, while Parragirls relate fragmented memories, retold as they themselves revisit the site in the present. 149 The Parragirls' memories speak of the harms and injustices they experienced, as well as the everyday acts of resistance, survival, friendship and love that they enacted in these circumstances.…”

“…For example, one Parragirl's 'memory of another Parragirl's scratching made in [the] Bethel [building of the Girls Home] in the late 1950s was the sole proof for a private compensation claim against a state welfare department because all of her welfare records had been destroyed'. 111 As Australia's longest-operating site of institutionalisation of children, women, Indigenous Australians and those labelled as mentally ill, the Precinct illustrates a variety of concerns that can inform how we frame, articulate and redress the injustices of institutionalisation. First, the repurposing of the Precinct site over nearly 200 years, while frequently a response to crises and scandals, did not prompt any fundamental rethinking of institutionalisation itself, but instead the further reification (via repurposing) of institutions of confinement in ways that continued to capture the same marginalised and precarious populations.…”

“…As Djuric argues, 'social control' was the central instrument of such institutions that it has been 'important that those with a direct experience' take back control over 'how they are remembered, how this history is interpreted and how these places are used in the future'. 114 Second, the many institutional iterations of the Precinct tell us that harm and injustice are not restricted to one particular time period, type of institution or sub-section of the population. The PFFP provides but one geographical site that witnesses and embodies the dynamics of institutionalisation and provides a continuity of institutionalisation and injustice from Australia's colonial beginnings to the present day.…”