Cleaning Out Our Houses

she lingers in archives / her trace is my memory / we labour dig sweat blister imagine / know them more intimately / so much work to be done to clean up this colonial mess.

— Natalie Harkin, 2021

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Houses and the wider built environment on this continent require some cleaning, to address the colonial mess they have helped create. They are introduced structures that are taken for granted but reflect an architectural mode that has helped to enforce colonial processes, such as indentured labour, stolen wages, stolen generations, language loss and racial inequality. These physical developments disrupted the cultural patterns and ways of existing on Country before invasion. First Nations artists and designers are highly aware of these challenges, leading to a range of innovative design initiatives that are rethinking how we build and create home on Country; contributing to the clean-up.

Esteemed Walbanga and Wadi Wadi designer Alison Page is among this wave, reclaiming the domestic to re-insert our culture into the accepted mode of western living that dominates this continent. She recently explained:

“When we step into a modern kitchen, it's easy to forget that our wondrous appliances – while efficient, convenient, practical and aesthetic – provide the same service that our ancient ancestor's campfires, grinding stones and stone age tools did over millennia. Even their most basic tools for preparing food were layered with a 65,000-year history told through symbols and stories, which are painted, burned and etched into their objects.”[1]

While the concept of the house as we know it across the past 250 years of colonial architecture suggests a disconnect with First Nations culture, these tensions are increasingly balanced by moments to re-imagine and re-claim tropes of the domestic to address the baggage it holds. As Page affirms, there is a tendency to valorise western inventiveness as if its “wondrous appliances” radically improved the lives of First Nations people, rather than to acknowledge First Nations peoples’ own practices and ways of living, which are steeped in 65,000 years of history. Even more urgently, Page also suggests spaces like the modern kitchen developed in problematic ways, often underpinned by Aboriginal labour that was never appropriately engaged, compensated or acknowledged.  Artists like those in The Unbound Collective, including Ali Gumillya Baker (Mirning), Faye Rosas Blanch (Mbararam, Yidinyji), Natalie Harkin (Narungga) and Simone Ulalka Tur (Yankunytjatjara), continue to investigate these uncomfortable histories to reveal the dark side of how we commonly imagine the home. The collective’s performance installations pointedly ask questions about what happened in the colonial settler’s home, where Aboriginal women laboured over chores and were forced into domestic roles they were never fully welcomed into, nor paid for. 

Wadawurrung artist Kait James speaks to these legacies in her own way. Slightly tongue in cheek but equally powerful, her work salvages a domestic trope – the common tea towel – as a mode to investigate the explicit racism held within these seemingly ordinary objects. The tea towels, which proliferated between the 1960s and 80s as souvenir merchandise, loom large in the propagation of Australiana, a highly kitsch and often offensive style of decoration applied to collectibles such as furniture, pottery, glass, bottles and textile goods, often employing pejorative and reductive images of First Nations people and culture. 

James repossesses and shifts the meaning of these once popular tea towels by re-embroidering them with new imagery and messages. Through this act, she symbolically starts to clean up the mess left by colonial racism and the many associations of the house and domestic sphere within this framework.  Her interventions create a new narrative that cheekily transform the original meaning of the tea towels while also addressing the power imbalances that the domestic realm in settler homes forcibly placed on Aboriginal women. When we look at James’ work, the embroidery techniques and needle craft that were once associated with servitude and loss of wages for Aboriginal women are now transformed into a contemporary First Nations artistic medium for addressing racialized domesticity. James describes it as a “balance between embracing tradition and confronting colonial residue”.

James’ tendency to use the materiality of the domestic as a critique of colonisation situates her practice in relation to other First Nations artists like Yhonnie Scarce and The Unbound Collective, yet this aspect of her work developed organically. She says the use of tea towels in her artwork was initially accidental. “I needed fabric to try out my new punch needle, so I grabbed a vintage tea towel and proceeded to subvert the imagery. That's what prompted the memories of Aboriginal Calendar tea towels from my childhood, and I started hunting them down.”

Rather than immediately linking the item to the home or the domestic as a critique, it was the portrayal of Indigenous people on the tea towels that shook James. “I aimed to reclaim and reinterpret these images, infusing them with new meaning and significance,” she says. “Obviously these ordinary, everyday objects have multiple layers of meaning and complexity. But for me, the tea towel has served as an ideal canvas for expressing narratives of resilience, resistance, and survival.”

For At Home in Wyndham, James’ showcase Hang us out to dry is installed in the kitchen of a suburban home. This has a potent effect, asking viewers to consider what it means to create and live on occupied Country that ‘hung out’ its First Peoples ‘to dry.’ Even if James’ initial desire to work with tea towels was not explicitly based on a critique of the domestic, its inclusion in this context certainly creates an unsettling re-imagining of the wider entitlement to home. James explained that the title not only “references literal domesticity but also alludes to the historical and ongoing struggles experienced by Indigenous peoples since colonisation”. Experiencing this work within a real home in Wyndham forces the viewer to confront the binary conflict inherent in our collective yearning for home and shelter on stolen land. It is an opportunity to remember that we need to re-conceptualise home within the context of decolonial design, and an invitation to consider what a truer sense of place might look like. 

Although many people are painfully aware of these tensions, James’ practice asks viewers who continue to ignore or erase these histories not to look away. It declares that we must understand our past to build a shared future. James tells me that when she started collecting tea towels, she was constantly surprised they didn’t have visible signs of intended use, but appeared to have been stashed away in linen cupboards and forgotten. James read this as an intentional act that she thinks stemmed from white peoples’ reluctance to have Aboriginal imagery in their kitchens. Her work airs these images and the histories attached to them out for all to see.

How we imagine the home in relation to First Nations sovereignty remains fraught, a problem likely to intensify in the broader housing crisis that dominates cities and regions, where securing the long term right to housing is increasingly compromised under capitalistic property agendas. But James’ tea towels are subversive reminders of First Nation peoples’ survival. A culture and people who continue to adapt to colonial conditions in confronting, challenging and inventive ways. In Hang us Out to Dry, the aesthetic tropes of the kitchen tea towel are re-appropriated. The tea towels may never have been used to wash the dishes of their original owners, but are now suddenly transformed to clean away colonial residue.