Spotlight on... Victorian women in public art

Creative Resilience Unveiled: Behind the scenes - video transcript.

[Gentle background music plays in the background throughout the video]

[Noise of street traffic in the distance]

[0:17 seconds: Trina Dalton-Oogjes - artist]
I don't think we were thinking budget at all. We were looking at bigger than Ben-Hur.

[0:21 seconds: Annie Brigdale - artist]
It was really important with the piece that it was big. We wanted it - you know, scale was really important.

[0:28 seconds]
We wanted to have something that inspired people to stop and think about what it was about.

[0:35 seconds: Glenda Nicholls - artist]
Creative resilience. I mean, what what other word could you use for the statue?

[0:44 seconds: Georgia MacGuire - artist]
When we were doing discussions about different ideas and we really workshopped what it was we actually wanted to say about Aboriginal women artists. And when we chose this design, we wanted it to hold a place of power and strength.

[1:02 seconds: Glenda Nicholls - artist]
Ngardang Girri Kalat Mimini was what we decided on the name for the group. I’m the Mimini in the group and Mimini is a Ngarrindjeri word. Mimini is mother, daughter, sister, auntie. All of those.

[1:20 seconds]
Our idea was to have it representing all Aboriginal women.

[1:23 seconds: Lorraine Brigdale - artist]
And the narrative that we wanted to tell was about Aboriginal women, our ancestors who found creative ways to make a living in an environment that was pretty terrible for them.

[1:38 seconds: Glenda Nicholls - artist]
They were the quiet achievers. They were the backbones of the family.

[1:41 seconds]
Sculptures and things like that, that are by women and and for women and tell stories of women is really important for our young people.

[1:51 seconds: Janet Bromley - artist]
As we all started to get together, we realised that we've all got that person in our life, grandparents and great grandparents and people who've gone through those really hard years of colonisation. And we started to realise that we would like to recognise all of those women.

[2:09 seconds: Georgia MacGuire - artist]
We're still mourning things like the Stolen Gen. I mean, the impact that that had on our, you know, our ancestors and our elders.

[2:18 seconds: Annie Brigdale - artist]
I believe that we are learning to understand the resilience of Aboriginal women in this country. I don't believe that the country as a whole understands the absolute resilience that they had to show just to survive and for us all to be here.

[2:39 seconds: Georgia MacGuire - artist]
Telling stories of the women and the matriarchs that I've been trying to tell stories of my whole practice. It feels like a bit of a mic-drop moment.

[2:50 seconds: Annie Brigdale - artist]
The highlight for me for being involved in the Victorian Women's Public Art Program has been to unite women in the conversation around the impact that women have in our society.

[3:04 seconds: Janet Bromley - artist]
This beautiful arm and basket will be a really visual sign for young First Nations people to say, Oh wow, we're here, we're actually here.

[3:15 seconds: Glenda Nicholls - artist]
We adapt and we use what's around us. And that's how Aboriginal people have survived. My fishnet weaving, the baskets that we make, the feather flowers - they were all once tools that our people used so we turned it into art.

[3:28 seconds: Trina Dalton-Oogjes - artist]
You know, when you are looking at a scale model of what we started with, like, the basket sat in our hands.

We all had a part in weaving it. So we are all in that sculpture. All of the media that was there, I was like, overwhelmed. I'm thinking, Oh, look what we have done.

[3:46 seconds: Janet Bromley - artist]
And there was a conversation we had with the engineer when we talked about an arm, and we said it has to look like a female’s arm and he said, all arms look the same and I go ‘No, they don't. They don't look the same.’ It can't be ‘just an arm’. It needs to be a female arm.

[4:01 seconds: Georgia MacGuire - artist]
When I first saw the statue, I cried. Really...I was, I’m going to get emotional. I was really proud.

[4:08 seconds: Trina Dalton-Oogjes - artist]
This is actually the hand of our mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters all together that have actually kept our mobs together.

When we think about our women of the past, our women of today and our young women of tomorrow... that's pretty powerful those two words together, Creative Resilience.

[Closing title card: Victoria State Government - Subscribe to the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing]

Honouring Zelda D'Arprano: a trailblazer for gender equality – video transcript

[Gentle guitar background music playing throughout]

[0.02 seconds: Professor Clare Wright OAM
Co-convener, A Monument of One’s Own]
Today’s such a significant event, because not only does it mean that there’s one more statue of a woman on Victoria’s streets, but also because it recognises the work of this extraordinary equal pay campaigner, this feminist, this unionist whose radical act in 1969 really was a turning point in the women’s movement.
So having her statue not only allows us to gather and remember what she did, but also to remember the unfinished business of pay equity and the importance of women’s economic security.

[0.33 seconds: Alva Geikie, Equal pay activist, Zelda D’Aprano’s comrade]
When Zelda chained herself up I read it in the paper and I thought, oh, this is not right, you know. So I rang her up and I thought, oh well, I’ll see if we can work together.
So then we decided on the chaining. It was a little bit daunting, but I think we were so annoyed at the time about the result of the equal pay case in 1969 because only about 18% or 20% of women would have got equal pay.

[0.58 seconds: Jennifer Mann, ‘Honouring Zelda D’Aprano’ sculptor]
It’s quite a male dominated area of sculpting practice to put up statues. So the other side of this program is not only recognising significant women in our culture and making sure that statues that surround us reflect women and men in our history and people that we want to honour, but it’s also important to sculptors like me who really appreciate the opportunity to sculpt statues.

[Background music fades out]