Apron-Sorrow / Sovereign-Tea
by Natalie Harkin
Reviewed by SAMUEL COX
It is not merely the spaces we inhabit in the present, nor the connections we hold, which give us our sense of self, there is another unstable and contested dimension which stretches away from us and back into the present to inflect our understanding: history. In Australia, the primacy yet disputed nature of this dimension has been epitomised in the so-called ‘history wars’ – a discursive conflict over how the country remembers its colonial past. The enduring gap between Indigenous experience and public narratives has led Alexis Wright to reframe this conflict as a discursive storytelling war – dating back to first contact – to shape perceptions of Aboriginal people (qtd. in Harkin p.19). Returning to the archive to reshape history, Natalie Harkin’s Apron-Sorrow / Sovereign-Tea tells the untold story of Indigenous domestic labour in South Australia, profoundly overturning the ‘State’s dominant and official public narrative’ (p.13).
Apron-Sorrow / Sovereign-Tea’s archival intervention picks up the thread into a practice begun in Harkin’s acclaimed poetry collection Archival Poetics (2019). A desire to write back to the records of the colonial surveillance state is evident in Indigenous writing as far back as Jack Davis’ No Sugar, Sally Morgan’s My Place and Kim Scott’s Benang, yet Archival Poetics can be seen as crystallising the archival turn in Indigenous Australian literature. Indebted to Archival Poetics, yet adopting a nonfiction-led interdisciplinary approach, Apron Sorrow / Sovereign Tea at once displays both the limits of creative practice to change ‘the public narrative of history’ and, in an utter paradox, its absolute indispensability. Harkin’s book recovers a history of domestic service which has remained secluded in the archives and occluded from existing feminist and labour histories. In doing so, she draws on a lineage of strong Aboriginal women, both familial – her many family members who worked in domestic service – and intellectual – trailblazing academics and writers such as Jackie Huggins (who writes the foreword) and Hyllus Maris.
Drawing on a vast assemblage of colonial archival extracts, letters, personalised memory stories and family photos – interspersed with fragments of poetry and visual arts practice – Apron Sorrow / Sovereign Tea dexterously coalesces into three parts. Harkin begins by framing the collection’s use of archival material and memory stories, before embarking on a masterful scholarly intervention which traces the history of labour exploitation and domestic service from the first days of the colony, framing its assimilatory violence against the paternalistic mission to ‘civilise.’ The collection then shifts to primary source material – the powerfully personalised memory stories of Indigenous women who worked as domestic servants, followed by voices from the archives, captured in epistolary remnants. The final section features a collection of creative works – art, poetry and images – from Harkin’s (together with her collaborators, The Unbound Collective) 2021 Apron Sorrow / Sovereign Tea exhibition and multidisciplinary installation. Taken together, Apron Sorrow / Sovereign Tea combines the hammer blows of its discursive intervention with a carefully wrought, even delicate, typographic and visual beauty for which Harkin and publisher Wakefield Press should be commended.
Apron Sorrow / Sovereign Tea’s profound intervention is to reveal that beneath the broader history of South Australia – yet often in close proximity, indeed, even servitude to the ‘history makers’ – exists an alternate history of Aboriginal domestic service. From the hallowed halls and storied corridors of Adelaide’s establishment elite to the rural farms and outback stations of those men, who in the words of Henry Lawson, ‘made Australia,’ there were young Indigenous women raising families, cleaning and working – often for a pittance. Familiar establishment and ‘old money’ family names, which remain imprinted on South Australia’s geography, recur across this collection; those elites who shaped the assimilatory policies from above and benefited from the exploitation this enabled from below.
Apron Sorrow / Sovereign Tea implicates early influential political figures such as Governors Grey and Robe, Captain Hart, Allan McFarlane, Margaret Bagot and Archdeacon Hale in the first ‘civilising’ use of Indigenous domestic labour. Yet it is an intensification of South Australia’s assimilatory strategies and surveillance apparatus in the twentieth century – underpinned by anthropological ‘science’ – which leads to the expansion and institutionalisation of domestic service as a key policy pillar. The crucial period from the late-1920s onwards, also coincides with the domination of South Australian politics by politically conservative Liberal and Country Party, with its influential Adelaide establishment faction (p.47). In this era, the ‘doyens of the… Adelaide establishment’ (p.34), appear as scientific authorities, taking the stage as ‘expert witnesses,’ such as Professor Edward Charles Stirling during the 1913 Royal Commission, and being incorporated into the State’s Aboriginal governance structures, such as Professor John B. Cleland appointed to the Aborigines Protection Board in 1940. From its Adelaide base, the Aborigines Protection Board administered a domestic service, which persuaded young Aboriginal women to leave their family to work in isolated households, thereafter, coercively restricting their movement and ability to return.
Even as the establishment dictated policy it also directly benefitted from its fruits, with places of employment for Aboriginal domestic servants including elite colleges, such as St Marks and St Peters, individual homes (which often go unnamed), the stations of pastoral conglomerates Elder Smith and Dalgety and Company and the Anglo-Australian joint defence complex at Woomera. The geographic scale of this operation astounds, extending from Adelaide’s corridors of power to locations stretching from Robe to Port Lincoln, and across remote cattle stations in the heart of the country, from Mount Dare to Mingary and Roxby Downs. Although the exact details generally remain opaque, the testimony reveals that the men of the house – including establishment figures – often shared a bed with these young Indigenous women. Yet those expecting to find feminine solidarity across racial lines would invariably be left disappointed, going by the Australian Woman’s Mirror’s articles about ‘Abo Maids’ published by ‘white mistresses’ (p.44), to voices like Yhonnie Scarce’s, who recalls that often ‘the white women were harder’ (p.117). Indeed, few hands remain untainted, with even Don Dunstan, the pink short-wearing Premier who brought the socially conservative Thomas Playford era to an end, having had an Indigenous domestic servant (p.107).
Even if domestic service cannot, in the strictest sense, be defined as slavery or apartheid, it nonetheless operates in clear relation to those models. In 1928, the Australian Aborigines Progressive Association described the practice thus: ‘girls of tender age and years are torn away from their parents […] and put to service in an environment as near to slavery as it is possible to find’ (p.54). In another anonymous letter dated 18 October 1935, a prospective employer assures the Chief Protector of Aborigines that his domestic servants won’t be spoiled, noting he had ‘employed coloured labour for many years in the S. African colony’ (p.164).
The plurality of voices and material Harkin draws upon will ensure that different moments will stay with each reader, but what remained with me were the little chinks in the armour of a racist system around which a better future might have been (but was not) built. Some of these included: the State’s first Indigenous school, Pitawodli – run by Lutheran Missionaries – maintaining and teaching in Kaurna language (p.25); Indigenous girls educated in the nineteenth century being better educated and more employable than many British and Irish immigrants (p.76); the artistic talents of mezzo-soprano Aunty ‘Dolly’ Joan Taylor who used to sing with David Unaipon (p.103); the petition and activism by the families of Point Macleay against the Aborigines (Training of Children) Act 1923, which mobilised their ‘crude and primitive weapon, love’ (p.39); the story of Ali Gumillya Baker who fell in love with her husband at the Fowler’s Bay Hotel, only to be disowned by his white family when they married (p.91).
The archive becomes a powerful tool in Harkin’s hands, though perhaps Apron Sorrow / Sovereign Tea’s crowning achievement is the way it recognises and overcomes the archive’s limitations. Scott has articulated how ‘ancestral women… [are] really silent in the archive’ and Harkin overcomes this absence through twelve powerful ‘blood memory stories’ (p.194) from women (and their families) who worked as domestic servants. These are stories of incredibly tough women who refuse to collapse themselves into victims, living their lives with agency and active resistance, which sometimes meant marrying young, working within the system and even sleeping with the boss, to above all survive and raise the next generation. Such oppressive systems are always sustained by internal contradictions, as Ali Gumillya Baker writes: ‘There is something sinister about how we were made to feel. Like our bodies were dirty, yet we were to clean their homes’ (93). Consequently, many of the women grapple with ‘mixed feelings’ (p.114) stemming from nostalgia and fond memories of lives that were lived, even as occasionally the mask slips to reveal the underlying harm. One effect of these twelve micro-memoirs, together with Harkin’s archival interventions, is to remap South Australia from the perspective of Indigenous women who worked in domestic service, revealing, for example, Adelaide’s West End as a haven of familial and social networks. Together the twelve women emerge from beneath the oppressive regime to emerge as matriarchs and community leaders who build lasting familial networks and Aboriginal institutions. Deeply rooted in the histories of Harkin’s great-grandmother, nanna, and aunties who laboured in domestic service, this book proudly continues that lineage.
Despite the profound archival and discursive work Apron-Sorrow / Sovereign-Tea does, Harkin positions this collection as ‘just one beginning’ (p.19). Nearly thirty-two years after the seemingly watershed moment that was Paul Keating’s Redfern address, there has been no widespread effort to repay stolen Indigenous wages in South Australia. Indeed, South Australia’s response to a successful compensation case in 2007 has been sclerotic, with the Attorney General restricting access to the State Aboriginal Record archives. Without access to these records, the Government of South Australia’s commendable commitment to implement the Uluru Statement from the Heart’s agenda of ‘Voice, Treaty, Truth’, rings out hollowly across the annals of a tortured colonial history.
Nonetheless, the brilliance of Harkin’s intervention lies in her orchestration of prose passages, epistolary archival fragments, excerpts of poetry, visual images and memory stories, forms that disrupt the banality of the archive and animate the lives of the women and families it once constrained. Harkin does not simply tell the history; she recreates and reshapes it in numerous, collaborative and open-ended ways that foreground the complexity of these women’s lives. Apron-Sorrow / Sovereign-Tea’s composite construction, grounded in Harkin’s archival-poetic practice, creates a book of rare aesthetic sophistication, purposefully crafted to transcend the linearity and containment of the colonial archive.
Cited
1. ‘The Men Who Made Australia.’ 1901. http://www.ironbarkresources.com/henrylawson/MenWhoMadeAustralia.html. Accessed 9 November. 2025.
2. Scott, Kim and Samuel Cox. ‘Writing from the South: An Interview with Kim Scott.’ Overland, no. 255, 2024, https://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-255/writing-from-the-south-an-interview-with-kim-scott/.
Dr. SAMUEL J. COX is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Tübingen and research fellow at the University of Adelaide. Samuel is a researcher and teacher of Australian and Southern literatures whose work has won ASAL’s A.D. Hope Prize and Australian Literary Studies PhD Essay Prize. He is particularly passionate about Australian writing and publishing in its myriad of forms and his forthcoming monograph Dust Country: Australian literature in the Age of the Anthropocene will be published with Routledge in 2026.