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 our archives.
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).