APRON-SORROW / SOVEREIGN-TEA: Living Legacy Archives and the Poetics of Reckoning

An Evening with Associate Professor Natalie Harkin (Narungga)

A Powerful Stories Network (PSN) event, co-sponsored with the Ritual and Performance Research Cluster at the Vere Gordon Childe Centre for the Study of Humanity Through Time

Wednesday May 13, 5:30-7:00 pm

Location - RD Watt Building, University of Sydney

Join Associate Professor Natalie Harkin (Narungga) - poet and Research Fellow with the Critical Indigenous Studies team as Flinders University to celebrate and discuss her Stella Prize nominated new book, Apron-Sorrow/Sovereign Tea. Dr. Harkin will relate her journey with the colonial archives, and specifically the State 'Domestic Service' records, and Archival-poetics as a research method and creative practice. She will illuminate the collaborative research with family and community to document memory stories and produce the creative work for the exhibition and book as a means to reveal and honour Aboriginal women's domestic services stories in South Australia. Dr. Harkin's work stands as a form of archival justice and the unfinished business of Stolen Wages in South Australia, and an urgent reminder that there's no 'truth telling' without access to archives.

Copies of Dr. Harkin's books, including Archival-Poetics and Apron-Sorrow, will be available to purchase at this event.

Biography:

Associate Professor Natalie Harkin (Narungga) is a poet and Research Fellow with the Critical Indigenous Studies team at Flinders University. Her research centres on Aboriginal women's domestic service and labour history and Indigenous Living-Legacy / Memory Story archiving innovations for our time. She is committed to archival justice and is a member of the inaugural State Records/State Library of South Australia's Aboriginal Reference Group; the national Indigenous Archives Collective; the First Nations Working Party of the Australian Dictionary of Biography, ANU; and a Fellow of the Australia Academy of the Humanities. Her words have been installed and projected in mixed-media exhibitions, including a decade long creative-arts research collaboration with the Unbound Collective. She is widely published, and her manuscripts include Dirty Words (Cordite Books, 2015), Archival-poetics (Vagabond Press, 2019), and APRON-SORROW / SOVEREIGN-TEA (Wakefield Press, 2025).

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