The red earth of Central Australia meets grains of black tea in Carmen Glynn-Braun’s artwork Memories of a Matriarch, while a slideshow depicts historic moments from the artist’s family history.

It’s Saturday afternoon on the eve of NAIDOC Week and a dozen of us are sitting in a circle in the Art Space on The Concourse in Sydney’s Chatswood. It’s a yarning circle of sorts, led by Cammeraygal elder Auntie Jeanie Moran, but not around a campfire – we’re centred on artist Carmen Glynn-Braun’s Memories of a Matriarch, an artwork made of red earth and black tea.

The frame is the symbol of women coming together and projected onto its blank centre is a series of photographs charting various points in the history – from a life-changing train trip to the homecoming of her niece on Country – of Glynn-Braun’s family, which spans Southern Arrernte, Kaytetye and Ammatyerre Country in Central Australia.

In 1943, the artist’s two grandmothers and great-grandmother were rounded up and taken from Central Australia on The Ghan to a half-caste institution where they trained as domestic servants and then given over to a life of indentured servitude. Flour, sugar and tea were their wages.

Glynn-Braun often uses black tea in her artwork to acknowledge this shameful form of slavery, but says it’s also about reclamation. “Tea has that dark history in Blak culture but ironically we tip it on its head where it’s the point of conversation. It’s a symbol of ‘I’m willing to listen to you and you’re welcome in my home’,” she explains. “And it’s affordable. You know, it doesn’t matter if I’m here in a gallery in Chatswood or if I’m sitting in a humpy – you’re going to get offered tea.”

It’s not the first time Glynn-Braun’s work has taken on these subjects. In 2022, the Memory River exhibition at the Parramatta Girls Home – an institution that trained ‘domestics’, many of whom were Indigenous, migrants or simply poor – showcased similar themes. She scattered flour, sugar and tea across the former laundry floor in a mock domestic space while a hundred teacups sat between thick lines of red earth from Central Australia. The teacups represented both domesticity and the invitation to converse.

“I’m on a mission to decolonise the tea set,” she states. “These symbols of oppression have become symbols of togetherness.”

This article originally appeared in AUSTCS enews 9 July 2024.